Five months after the Times and FBI officials raised the question of abandoning their standards in order to stop Trump, their trade hadn’t yielded much of a return. Trump had won a stunning election victory. And despite an aggressive surveillance campaign involving confidential sources secretly recording Trump associates and numerous misrepresentations to the FISA court, the FBI had not only come up dry; it was collecting many reasons to doubt the claims in the Steele dossier—the heart of its probable cause argument—and mounting exculpatory evidence for the Trump associates it had targeted for investigation.
The early weeks of January 2017 were officially part of the presidential transition between the Obama and Trump administrations. But they can also be seen as the period when the Obama administration, having failed to generate evidence of collusion, referred the case to friends in the U.S. media, where evidentiary standards were lower and even a failed investigation could be used to damage the new president.
The deceptions inflicted on the FISA court would be rivaled by those FBI director James Comey inflicted on Donald Trump. By October 2016, Comey’s FBI had heard from another government agency—but did not share with the FISA court—that Carter Page had served as an operational contact for U.S. intelligence. This undermined the central Steele claim that Page was at the center of some kind of conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.5 The FBI had learned from Steele himself that a key sub-source for his claims was a “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.”6 The FBI had also learned that Steele had falsely claimed to them that he only shared his reporting with the FBI and Fusion GPS, his client funded by Democrats. The FBI also knew—but again did not share with the FISA court—that Carter Page had been recorded without his knowledge telling a confidential source that he had never met a number of the people Steele claimed that he had.7
Then in early November 2016 the FBI dismissed Steele as a confidential source after he broke protocol by disclosing his work and his relationship with the FBI while serving as an anonymous source for a magazine article. The outlet was the left-wing publication Mother Jones.8
But the FBI still wanted to use Steele’s claims to maintain the bureau’s anti-Trump surveillance. After the FBI fired Steele, he was able to continue feeding the bureau his anti-Trump material via Department of Justice attorney Bruce Ohr, whose wife had worked for Fusion GPS, the firm which had been paid by Democrats to get dirt on Trump and had hired Steele for this purpose.9
At a meeting in November of 2016 with FBI officials overseeing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Ohr specifically told them that Steele’s material was going to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Ohr also reported that Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.”10
In November and December of that year the FBI interviewed overseas contacts who had worked with Steele in the past and received mixed reviews, including specific references to Steele’s “poor judgment.”11
But even though the FBI could not corroborate any of Steele’s key claims, continued to collect evidence contradicting them, continued to learn reasons to doubt his motivations and his judgment, and had fired him as a confidential source, the leadership of the FBI would not stop promoting his dossier.
Having misled the FISA court, the bureau then sought to place Steele’s claims at the center of the U.S. intelligence community’s upcoming assessment of Russia’s role in U.S. elections. In December the FBI disseminated Steele’s material across the U.S. intelligence community, and senior FBI officials sent notes to colleagues at other agencies calling Steele “reliable.”12
In a December 17, 2016, memo to a number of bureau colleagues, FBI director James Comey reported that the previous night he had told Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that the FBI thought it was “important” to include Steele’s claims in the intelligence report and that Steele “appears to be a credible person with a source and sub-source network in position to report on such things, but we could not vouch for the material. (I said nothing further about the source or our efforts to verify.)”13 Was it too much to ask that Comey at least mention that the FBI was no longer willing to do business with this source that it kept promoting as reliable?
It makes sense that Comey didn’t want to say anything further about Steele or the FBI’s verification efforts. To say anything more would have made it nearly impossible to maintain the position that the reporting was credible. For years since, Comey has continued to not want to say anything further. When questioned about Steele—the man whose dubious work Comey had sold to the chief of U.S. intelligence—at a 2018 joint executive session of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, Comey would present himself as only vaguely aware of Steele, his work, and his funders.14
But back in December of 2016, Comey’s FBI was attempting to make Steele’s unverified claims the consensus view on Trump and Russia. The CIA dismissed Steele’s claims as “internet rumor” but Comey’s FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe took the lead in insisting that they be included in the intelligence community’s assessment on Russia and U.S. elections that would be presented to President Obama and President-elect Trump in January.15 Faced with skepticism from others in the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI accepted a compromise in which the dossier material was not included in the main body of the report but appeared in an appendix.16
One can only imagine how skeptical the intelligence community, not to mention the judges of the FISA court, would have been if the FBI had shared all its evidence contradicting Steele. The bureau had already collected more than enough information to dismiss the claims as internet rumor or worse.
The point is
