Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, has been documenting the numerous problems with Steele and his dossier, including the many reasons not to believe it. Democrats weren’t Steele’s only clients.
“Steele had multiple contacts with representatives of Russian oligarchs with connections to Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) and senior Kremlin officials,” reports the inspector general.9
“Steele’s frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit,” adds the IG’s report, but this information wasn’t even shared with members of the FBI team using Steele’s reporting to investigate the Trump campaign.10
The December 2019 inspector general’s report described questions related to a particular unnamed ally of Russian ruler Vladimir Putin: “We asked Steele about whether he had a relationship with Russian Oligarch 1. Steele stated that he did not have a relationship and indicated that he had met Russian Oligarch 1 one time. He explained that he worked for Russian Oligarch l’s attorney on litigation matters that involved Russian Oligarch 1 but that he could not provide ‘specifics’ about them for confidentiality reasons.”11 So, according to Steele, he did not have a relationship with someone who was funding his work?
As for his infamous dossier, Steele wasn’t actually doing much work at all. “Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting,” says the inspector general’s report.12 Steele had farmed out the task of reporting to somebody else and Steele never told the FBI who it was.13
To summarize, an anti-Trump former foreign spy whose clients included representatives of a Russian oligarch and the Hillary Clinton campaign provided the critical evidence in the collusion investigation from a source he did not disclose.
Believe it or not, this was enough—along with the suppression of exculpatory evidence—to get a wiretap on an associate of the Trump campaign named Carter Page. Some Trump opponents have spent years pretending that Steele’s dossier was just one part of a huge mosaic of solid evidence justifying the surveillance and the overall investigation.
But the Obama-appointed inspector general found that without Steele’s claims there would have been no Justice Department request for a wiretap under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: “We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016, played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.”14
The inspector general’s report notes that before the use of the Steele dossier, the FBI general counsel’s office and the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence had rejected the idea of seeking a wiretap on Page in August of 2016. There wasn’t enough information to support a probable cause finding that Page was an agent of a foreign power.15 And there wasn’t enough information to support a probable cause finding against anyone else associated with Trump, which was why the FBI focused on Page.
Not that the use of Steele’s dossier was the only abuse of Carter Page. The government successfully applied for a warrant to spy on him in the fall of 2016 and then persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to grant a series of renewals. According to the Office of the Inspector General, “We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications—7 in the first FISA application and a total of 17 by the final renewal application.”16
The FBI had stacked the deck against Page. The IG reports: “As a result of the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions we identified, relevant information was not shared with, and consequently not considered by, important Department decision makers and the court, and the FISA applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case. We also found basic, fundamental, and serious errors during the completion of the FBI’s factual accuracy reviews, known as the Woods Procedures, which are designed to ensure that FISA applications contain a full and accurate presentation of the facts.”17
More than a year before the Obama-appointed inspector general made this report, then U.S. representative John Ratcliffe said the same thing on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures. To obtain the warrant to surveil Carter Page, the FBI had only shown the court evidence that bolstered its case, without disclosing facts that called it into question.18 By then much of the press corps had already decided to buy the narrative from Trump opponents, regardless of the burgeoning evidence of FBI abuses.
Speaking of these abuses, they went far beyond omitting evidence favorable to Carter Page. Not satisfied with hiding the facts, at least one FBI attorney altered exculpatory evidence and made it appear incriminating. Among advisers to the Trump campaign, Page was attractive as a target to the FBI because he did business in Russia and he’d met with some shady characters there. These facts could go a long way toward persuading a judge that Page was a Russian agent—as long as the judge never learned the truth: Page had been working with the CIA. Helping a U.S. intelligence agency collect information on the Russians should have earned Page the thanks of a grateful nation. Spying on Putin’s Russia is dangerous work. But the FBI not only never told the court he was assisting the good guys; the bureau falsely presented some of his helpful activities as evidence he was helping the bad guys.
The same falsehood was leaked to the press. “I kept getting these calls from reporters throughout the summer of 2016 asking about these totally false allegations which Fusion G.P.S. and their consultants were doing for the DNC,” he says. Were Democrats trying to muddy him up to justify the investigation? “Exactly. Well, really, to muddy then-candidate Trump up,” Page concludes.19
Some FBI officials no doubt noticed that instead of lawyering up and staying silent, Page was publicly insisting that the claims against him were false. Before the last renewal for wiretap authority in 2017, after Page had
