In his videotaped deposition, Steele was even blunter in discrediting his own work. He said his “dossier” incorporated what he had thought was a story on CNN’s website, not realizing that it was “nothing more than any random person posting things on the internet.”31 He conceded that he had been trolling the internet for information to insert into his “dossier.” He dismissed it as “research” for a private company, not verified or reliable information. In other words, his anti-Trump memos were uncorroborated junk.
Steele’s former boss at MI6, Sir John Scarlett, appears to have been quite aware that his onetime agent had composed a dodgy document that would never meet the standards of credible intelligence. Scarlett rejected it as “unverified and overrated”—nothing more than a “commercial” enterprise to make money.32 When asked what working with Steele had been like, all that was offered was the curt reply “I’m not going to comment.” His silence spoke volumes. Others who worked with Steele were caustic and unkind in their assessments of both his skill and intelligence. The current head of MI6 “is said to be livid” at Steele for “causing worldwide embarrassment to British secret services.”33
A congressional investigation found that Clinton associates were also feeding Steele bogus information as he compiled his “dossier.”34 One of the more salacious allegations he described as “fifty-fifty” in its validity. It appeared to have come from a Belarusan-born American businessman named Sergei Millian, who was regarded by Simpson as “a big talker.”35 In a veiled reference to the partisan motivations behind his report, Steele cautioned that “its content must be critically viewed in light of the purpose for and circumstances in which the information was collected.”36 In plain language, it was an untruthful political attack intended to vilify an opposing candidate, Donald Trump.
As for Simpson, he grudgingly admitted in his congressional testimony that he had taken no steps to vet or verify any of the contents of the “dossier” or even ask Steele about its veracity.37 He had accepted it on blind faith because, as he explained, Steele was the Russian expert, and he trusted his competence. It did not matter to Simpson that the allegations against Trump were offensive, outrageous, and even ludicrous. He appeared to be more interested in the political havoc he could wreak on the Republican nominee than in truth or accuracy. In other testimony, Simpson said that Steele’s dossier had been elicited from “human source information.” He then added, “And humans sometimes lie, and more frequently they just get it wrong.”38 Thus, both men knew that their anti-Trump memos might well contain faulty intelligence or, more plainly, lies. That did not deter them at all.
Steele and Simpson were determined to utilize the “dossier” to nullify Trump in his bid to be the next president of the United States. That was not a new tactic for Fusion GPS. The firm and its founder had an alarming reputation for smear campaigns based on “prepared dossiers containing false information” and “carefully placed slanderous news items,” as Senate investigators learned from several of its victims.39 Simpson was at it again. This time, he had a much bigger target in his sights, and the damage he could incite would be momentous.
Simpson and Steele devised a comprehensive strategy to disseminate their “dossier.” Part one was to circulate the document to sympathetic officials at the FBI and Department of Justice, who might then launch an investigation of Trump. Part two was to share it with certain anti-Trump members of the press, who would serve as an instrumental part of the plan to destroy the GOP nominee with “collusion” stories in publications, on television, and on social media. Facts were irrelevant as long as Simpson and Steele could sell a salacious story to those who were predisposed to believe it, even in the absence of real evidence. They would also profit by it financially.
As soon as Steele composed his June 20 memo, he notified Simpson, revealed its contents, and sent him a copy via an encrypted communication. In several ensuing telephone conversations, the two men solidified their blueprint for propagating the “dossier”: feed it to the FBI and circulate it among the rapacious American media. In later testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Simpson claimed that Steele had alerted the FBI during the first week in July 2016.40 This may not be entirely accurate. There is some evidence that Steele delivered the document to the FBI within days of its completion either by sending it through a secure communication to an agent in Rome or by hand delivering it to him after catching a flight to the Italian capital.41 Regardless, a formal meeting between Steele and the FBI agent was scheduled for early July in London. It happened on the very day that Comey cleared Hillary Clinton in her email scandal.
The Pivotal Day: July 5, 2016
It was 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 5, 2016, when James Comey stood before television cameras and microphones at a nationally watched news conference. Mangling the law and contorting the facts, he announced that he was exonerating Clinton of any crimes for her mishandling of thousands of classified documents. As far as Comey was concerned, that was the end of the Clinton case.
While Comey was speaking, Americans had no idea that crucial steps were being taken to simultaneously convert the FBI’s immense power and investigative resources from one presidential candidate to the other. As the Clinton case concluded, the Trump case was just beginning. Had Americans known, they would have been both bewildered and outraged that such a Machiavellian dynamic was unfolding on two continents concurrently.
Some 3,660 miles away from Washington, DC, Comey’s FBI was meeting at Orbis headquarters for the first time with Steele since he had composed his initial “dossier” memo dated June 20, 2016. The agent, identified as Michael Gaeta, had flown to London from Rome, where he was an attaché at the US Embassy.42 Victoria Nuland, a top Obama State Department official, authorized the meeting, although FBI headquarters would certainly have been well aware of it.43 During the encounter, Steele conveyed the contents of his initial “dossier” to Gaeta, as well as other unsubstantiated allegations against Trump that Steele had been preparing for four additional July memos. Gaeta then passed the information to Nuland, who delivered it to the FBI.44 Those memos were equally outrageous in their accusations and, as before, derived from either fictitious Russian sources or unreliable multiple hearsay:
Trump associates Paul Manafort and Carter Page were “intermediaries” in the Trump-Russia conspiracy to influence the presidential election.
Page held “secret meetings in Moscow” with top Kremlin officials and promised to have Trump lift sanctions against Russia in exchange for a 19 percent stake in the oil company Rosneft (further detailed in a later “dossier” memo).
“TRUMP and senior members of his campaign” were involved in the hacking by Russia of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails then published by WikiLeaks.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, held “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives” in Prague.
Instead of consummating real estate deals in Russia, “TRUMP had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success.”
“An intelligence exchange had been running” between the Trump team and the Kremlin “for at least 8 years.”45
All of those accusations were little more than fantasy. Each of them could be disproved, had the FBI investigated at the outset. Page had not held secret meetings in Moscow. No evidence surfaced to the contrary. He had traveled there to deliver a speech at the New Economic School, where Barack Obama had given a speech years earlier.46 Page’s address was well publicized in advance, which is likely how Steele and Simpson gained their information—from newspapers and/or the internet. Similarly, the hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign emails was already known to the public by the time Steele authored his “dossier” memo on the subject, and Russia was the prime suspect.47 There was never any evidence that the Trump campaign was a participant. Finally, Steele’s contention of an eight-year-long relationship of intelligence sharing between the “Trump team” and the Kremlin defied common sense and logic.
It was a silly claim that undermined the “dossier” as a whole.
But the most comical assertion was that Page would pocket a 19 percent stake in one of Russia’s most valuable assets, the state-controlled oil company Rosneft, in exchange for the prospect of lifting Western sanctions. In dollars, the payout would approximate $11 billion.48 It is absurd to think that Moscow would pay an enormous bribe to a volunteer “junior, unpaid adviser” who had never met the candidate and had few real connections to the campaign.49 That, of course, did not stop Democrats like Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) of the House Intelligence Committee from advancing this screwball conspiracy during hearings on Capitol Hill.50 Page vigorously denied any involvement in such a plot. Despite his having been wiretapped by the FBI for more than a year, no incriminating evidence was ever found and no charges were ever brought against him. With their “dossier,” Simpson and Steele managed to victimize an innocent man.
As will be discussed in a later chapter, Manafort was convicted of financial crimes that predated by many years his joining the Trump campaign. The charges had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump-Russia “collusion,” and no evidence was ever presented by prosecutors alleging a Kremlin conspiracy to throw the presidential election. Like Page, Manafort was never an “intermediary” working at the behest of Russia. A later iteration of the “dossier” claimed that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen had met secretly in Prague with a Kremlin official to arrange cash payments and devise a cover-up operation.51 Had the FBI bothered to look, records showed that Cohen had been in Los Angeles and New York during the stated time frame. No documents placed him in Prague. During his congressional testimony in February 2019, Cohen stated under oath that he had never so much as visited the Czech Republic.52
There was nothing intelligent about the so-called intelligence document created by Steele and Simpson. With seed money from the Clinton campaign and Democrats, they composed a collection of fables designed to defame and discredit Trump and those associated with him. For a while, it seemed to work. The FBI eagerly appropriated the “dossier” and, without first verifying any of the claims, launched a dilating investigation of Trump that began in earnest on the same day Comey cleared Clinton.
As the document gained currency in the FBI, agent Peter Strzok boarded a plane at the end of July or early August and headed to London, from which the “dossier” had originated. Text messages he exchanged with his lover, Page, were redacted in key places by the FBI and DOJ, making it difficult to discern the identities of individuals with whom he met in the United Kingdom. But his visit appears to have been profitable in furthering the “collusion” hoax, since Strzok described a particular meeting as productive.53 A discussion took place with Page about how to conceal information from future Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the event the trip became known. References in those emails make it clear that the CIA was involved and “the White House is running this.”54 But Strzok was operating in the shadows.
Feeding the “Dossier” to the Department of Justice
Steele and Simpson were not merely satisfied with dumping the “dossier” into the lap of the FBI. They wanted to ensure that it received a wider audience in US law enforcement, inasmuch as the presidential election was fast approaching. Something had to be done about Trump. He was behind in the polls, but nothing could be left to chance. If the coconspirators could trigger a criminal investigation of the candidate and leak the information to the press, Clinton’s waltz to the White House would be all but assured.
Steele flew to Washington, DC, to meet with a high-ranking Justice Department official he had known for years, Bruce Ohr. On July 30, 2016, at 9:00 a.m., the ex–British spy met at the Mayflower Hotel with Ohr, who held the number four position at DOJ as associate deputy attorney general.55 Steele conveyed the contents of the “dossier” to him but added that the FBI already had some of the memos in its possession.56 Of course it did; Steele had shared the documents with a Bureau agent on July 5. This, and other evidence, clearly undermined the long-standing contention by Democratic representative Adam Schiff that Steele’s information “did not reach the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters until mid-September 2016.”57 In truth, the FBI team had it in July and perhaps as early as June, when the first memo was written. Either Schiff knew that, or he was badly misinformed.
Also attending the Mayflower Hotel meeting with Steele was Ohr’s wife. Not coincidentally, she had been hired months earlier by Simpson as a contractor for Fusion GPS. Her assignment was to develop anti-Trump research that could be used for the benefit of Fusion’s clients, the Clinton campaign, and the DNC. In her private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Nellie Ohr stated that her specific task was to develop evidence that might show how Trump and his family had engaged in illicit dealings with the Russians.58 She told Congress that she investigated Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and even the candidate’s wife, Melania Trump.59 Naturally, that was intended to help support the “dossier.” She admitted that her political views had influenced her decision to target Trump, “Because I favored Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.”60
Just how much anti-Trump information Nellie Ohr shared with her husband is unclear, because she refused to answer many key questions by invoking the spousal privilege that protects one spouse from being incriminated by the testimony of the other.61 When Bruce Ohr appeared behind closed doors for his testimony, he insisted that he had never read the opposition research his wife had prepared against Trump. He also stated that he had not read any of the documents that Steele had given him. Instead, he said, he had decided to hand them over to the FBI without examining their contents. Hard to believe, but that’s what he stated.
There is now substantial evidence that Nellie Ohr provided false testimony when she appeared before the two House committees conducting a joint investigation.62 Under questioning, she insisted that she had shared her research only with Fusion GPS, Steele, and her husband. This was not true. Three hundred thirty-nine pages of emails show she sent it to at least three other prosecutors at the Justice Department.63 Those same emails prove that she was well aware of the DOJ’s Russia investigation, even though she claimed otherwise when she testified. A criminal referral on Nellie Ohr was promptly sent to the Justice Department.
While Nellie Ohr was working behind the scenes to discredit and damage Trump, her husband at the DOJ continued to serve as a “conduit” between Steele/Simpson and the FBI to feed the “dossier” beast. He would later deliver to the Bureau two USB flash drives or “memory sticks” containing derogatory information about Trump, including the “dossier,” that had been given to him separately by his wife and Simpson.64 Ohr’s cloak-and-dagger role as a covert intermediary is curious, if not suspect, since Steele had already met with FBI agent Gaeta in London three weeks earlier and had been on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human resource (CHR) since at least February 2016.65 Steele wasn’t working for just one client; he was working for three. He was collecting money from the FBI, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign. He and his benefactors, who funneled the cash through Simpson’s Fusion GPS, all had a concomitant interest: trashing Trump.
Whether Ohr knew it or not, he was being manipulated by Simpson and Steele with unverified and phony information. Predictably, Ohr contacted a top official at the FBI immediately following the breakfast meeting with Steele. The desired result was achieved. The very next day, July 31, 2016, the Bureau executed papers to formally launch its investigation of Trump, nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane”—a description not nearly as benign as Clinton’s “Midyear Exam.”66 Not surprisingly, it was the Trump-hating FBI agent Peter Strzok who signed the documents that would metastasize into a full-blown campaign to harass and torment Trump for the better part of the next three years.67 It was an unprecedented action. A presidential administration had launched a counterintelligence operation against the campaign of a candidate from the opposing party. Ohr never advised his
superiors about his many actions in feeding the FBI the anti-Trump material nor his clandestine meeting with Steele and others of the rendezvous that followed.68 Instead, shortly after the July 30 debriefing by Steele on the “dossier,” Ohr convened a meeting with FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe and the FBI lawyer who worked for him directly, Lisa Page. Their get-together occurred in McCabe’s office. No one seems to remember the exact date. Although given the urgency that Ohr said he had felt, it appears to have happened directly following the July 30 breakfast with Steele. After detailing the “dossier,” Ohr testified that he had specifically warned McCabe and Page that the information in the document was highly dubious and driven by a biased author who despised Trump. Ohr also advised that it had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, where his wife worked, because “I wanted the FBI to be aware of any possible bias.”69
QUESTION: Do you recall whether it was [to] you that Chris Steele said he was desperate that Donald Trump not win?
OHR: I think I said that to the FBI, yes. . . . I don’t recall the exact words. I definitely had a very strong impression that he did not want Donald Trump to win . . . 70
Later in his testimony, Ohr reiterated all of the warnings he had given to the FBI that Steele might not be a trustworthy source and that the information in his “dossier” might be unreliable, if not bogus:
OHR: When I spoke with the FBI, I told them my wife was working for Fusion GPS. I told them Fusion GPS was doing research on Donald Trump. . . . I told them this is the information I had gotten from Chris Steele. . . . I told them that Steele was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected. So those are all facts that I provided the FBI.71
When questioned later by the FBI investigators, Ohr was even more emphatic about Steele’s flagrant bias. Official Bureau files note that Steele had stated he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”72 Ohr insisted that he repeated that warning to the FBI on more than one occasion. He pointedly informed it that Trump’s political rival, the Clinton campaign, was financially underwriting the “dossier,” which would call into question its veracity because the campaign had a motive to distort or fabricate in order to damage its opponent. In his congressional testimony, Ohr insisted that he had cautioned the FBI, “These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware . . .”73 The funding wasn’t merely “related to” the campaign; it was the campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee.
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