Steele’s most explosive report turned out to be his first, crafted in June, in which he claimed the Russians were already regularly feeding “intelligence” to the Trump campaign, and that they had compromising video of Trump performing “perverted sexual acts” while in a Moscow hotel room in 2013. Steele immediately called up his old U.S. law enforcement buddies, and delivered this bombshell accusation at a July 5 meeting in London with an FBI agent.
Give Steele and Fusion credit for cleverness. Normally, political campaigns have to “shop” their oppo-research to the media, and convince reporters of its accuracy. Fusion knew this was a dead end; nothing in the report was verified. So Steele instead took the Clinton oppo-research to the FBI and peddled it as “intelligence.” And once the FBI took possession, Steele and Fusion were able to point the media to the Bureau and the investigation itself. The media never had to take responsibility for the veracity of the claims, and Fusion and the Clinton campaign still got their phony narrative.
What did the FBI immediately do with that information? We don’t know. The Bureau has gone to huge lengths to hide its actions during July. But we know what it should have done. The FBI has rules requiring it to thoroughly vet its sources for motivation and credibility. Nothing about Steele’s ludicrous tale passed a basic sniff test.
Consider the sheer absurdity of his 007 claims. At the time Steele put together his first dossier report, he had not been active in professional intelligence circles in seven years. Yet his report insisted it was informed by sources intimately connected to Putin—whose Kremlin is otherwise impenetrable. Steele was claiming to have unraveled the greatest political conspiracy in a generation, one that every other intelligence agency on the planet—possessing the most sophisticated spycraft tools available—had missed. And he was suggesting he’d done it in the space of a few weeks, using nothing more than his telephone.
Then there was the craziness of the information itself, which grew with each report and which suggested that everyone in the entire Kremlin was spilling their guts to him. This sudden flood of Russian information should have set off enormous FBI alarm bells. Early in his career, Steele worked under diplomatic cover as an MI6 agent in Moscow, and later under diplomatic cover in Paris. But that cover was blown in 1999, when a disaffected former MI6 agent publicly listed the names of 117 British spies. Steele, in other words, was known to the Russians.
In his private career, he’d also taken to sending reports on Russia and Ukraine to the U.S. State Department. Former Obama State Department official Jonathan Winer would in 2018 admit that he’d been friendly with Steele since 2009, and starting as early as 2013 had arranged for “more than 100 of Steele’s reports” on Russia to be shared with his State colleagues. Were any Russians aware of Steele’s relationships with U.S. actors in the FBI and State? The U.S. intelligence community by mid-2016 knew Russia was attempting to interfere in the U.S. election. Russians are famous for disinformation campaigns, and the FBI should have immediately wondered if the Steele information was a potential plant by an adversary. (More on Mueller’s failure to investigate this in Chapter 6.)
Had the FBI done due diligence, it would have also discovered that Steele had links to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with Kremlin ties. E-mails show that in 2016—separate from his work on the dossier—Steele was probing and pushing U.S. government contacts for information about a U.S. visa Deripaska wanted. Steele, on the one hand, was telling the FBI he wanted to help protect the U.S. against Russian influence. He was, on the other hand, tied to influential Russians. This certainly undermined his credibility.
The FBI might also have discovered that Steele’s pals at Fusion were also tied up with Russians. Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties, was laboring in early 2016 to defend a Russian company against federal money-laundering charges. Fusion was hired, via a U.S. law firm, to dredge up negative information on the men who had helped bring to light that reported fraud.
This was the same Veselnitskaya who in June 2016 sought a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner. She initially claimed to have dirt on the Clinton campaign, but when she showed up at Trump Tower, she instead wanted to talk about Russian sanctions. Veselnitskaya met with Simpson both before and after that Trump Tower event. Simpson denies any knowledge of that meeting and insists Fusion’s work on the dossier was kept separate from its work for a Kremlin-linked attorney. But an FBI that did its homework on its sources would have had serious concerns about the integrity of the Fusion-Steele operation.
Then again, maybe the FBI did know all this and just ignored it. That would at least explain its decision to also ignore the clear evidence that Fusion and Steele were using the Bureau to grind a political axe. And helping out political actors is also a clear violation of FBI rules.
As the summer went on, Steele and his taskmasters engaged in a concerted pressure campaign to get the FBI to act, dumping their dossier with other government sources. Steele sat down for breakfast on July 30, 2016, with an old Justice Department buddy and associate attorney general, Bruce Ohr. It was a pretty clubby meal. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion GPS, helping with the oppo-research against Trump. During the meeting with the Ohrs, Steele passed along his dossier information. Bruce Ohr immediately turned around and gave the oppo to the FBI’s then–Deputy Director Andy McCabe as well as lawyer Lisa Page. In August, Ohr says, he took it to Peter Strzok, the Bureau’s lead Trump-Russia investigator. And at some point he additionally briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. This helped ensure that by August, pretty much every FBI and DOJ leader involved in the Trump-Russia investigation was aware of the dossier.
Steele meanwhile went to his State Department friend, Winer, in the summer of 2016, and warned him about possible ties between Trump and Russians. By September, Winer had reviewed the dossier and passed a summary straight up to Secretary of State John Kerry. Winer admitted he also passed along Steele information to Sydney Blumenthal, a Hillary Clinton operator. And in October, Steele sat down to discuss his dossier with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, who sent a memo to colleagues explaining that Steele was “keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8.” Steele’s political motives were clear.
And then there was FBI general counsel James Baker. At some point that fall, Mr. Baker’s self-described “old friend” David Corn, a Mother Jones reporter, reached out. Corn, too, had a copy of the dossier to deliver to the FBI, which Baker later said he “assumed” Corn got from “Simpson, or someone acting on Simpson’s behalf.” In congressional testimony, Mr. Baker explained that the FBI knew Fusion was papering the FBI and the town with its opposition research. “My recollection is that [Corn] had part of the dossier, that we had other parts already, and that we got still other parts from other people,” said Baker. He further admitted: “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile.”
This was a clear political hit job, and if that wasn’t already obvious to the FBI, Mr. Baker got another call in the fall, this one from an acquaintance named Michael Sussmann. He, too, was a Clinton-DNC lawyer at Perkins Coie and, oddly, wanted to meet in person. Baker made the phenomenally poor decision to directly sit down with a Clinton representative and accept by hand a further passel of allegations about Trump misdeeds. The general counsel admitted in congressional testimony that all this was way out of protocol: evidence does not normally flow through the FBI’s general counsel. He acknowledged he was likely targeted by both Corn and Sussmann in their hopes that any information passed along from an FBI general counsel would automatically be taken seriously. He also implicitly admitted how inappropriate it was for the FBI’s top lawyer to be accepting dirt from a political operative during the run-up to a presidential election. He said he was concerned about the Sussmann material “from the first instance,” and that as “soon as” Sussmann l
eft, he called FBI agents and “got rid of the material as quickly as I could.”
Which gets to the ultimate reason the FBI should have run from the dossier: It came from the Clinton campaign, and the FBI knew it. Remember that DOJ memo from Holder stressing political sensitivities? The seasoned professionals at the FBI knew better. Heck, even the public understood how wrong it was to go down this road. In December 2017, a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll queried the public’s view of the dossier. A full 58 percent of respondents agreed that if the dossier was funded by Clinton and Democrats, it could not be used by law enforcement.
This might explain why Comey purposely maintains a blasé attitude about the dossier to this day, claiming he can’t really remember much about when he was briefed, never really knew exactly who funded it, etc. Such information, he testified, “didn’t matter” in light of the fact that it came from a “reliable source.”
Disingenuous, and likely untrue. Congressional testimony proves that the entirety of Comey’s inner circle knew about the dossier’s provenance, and well before the election. They never told their boss? When Bruce Ohr turned over the dossier in midsummer to McCabe and Page, he did so with a warning. He testified that he told the senior leadership of the FBI that the Steele info was politically biased and unproven: “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.” He also told the team that Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.”
Baker said that the FBI was aware of the dossier’s provenance, and that it was playing with fire. He explained that one of the reasons he later took such a close interest in an October 2016 application to eavesdrop on Page was because “there were a range of issues with respect to the providence [sic] of this information and the relationship that we had with respect to Mr. Simpson and his credibility.”
The FBI was getting beat over the head with signs it was being used and played. It closed its eyes and continued breaking rules.
* * *
The FBI leaders and agents who ran the 2016 probe have worked hard to suggest that they had an unlimited right to pursue the Trump campaign and that their actions were routine. In fact, the FBI has a huge manual—the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide—that lays out strict rules and procedures. The guide includes entire sections on “privacy” and “civil liberties”; the need to use “least intrusive methods”; the importance of having honest “predications” for investigations; rules about “undercover operations” and “the monitoring of communications” and even the “acquisition of foreign intelligence information.” Investigations are also normally run out of field offices, allowing FBI headquarters to act as a check on satellite behavior. Comey instead decided to run the Trump probe out of headquarters itself. And with no higher authority to stop them, he and his investigators threw the manual out the window.
In March 2016, a young and relatively inexperienced policy junkie named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as an unpaid adviser. Papadopoulos at the time was working for the London Centre of International Law Practice. About a month after joining the Trump team, Papadopoulos sat down in London with a person he’d met through work, Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud was a Maltese professor. He remains a mysterious figure, one that has seeming connections both to Russian academics and to Western intelligence officials. At their breakfast on April 26, 2016, Mifsud is said to have told Papadopoulos that the Russians had material on Clinton that could be damaging to her.
Only a few weeks later, Papadopoulos found himself having drinks with Alexander Downer, who was at that time Australia’s top representative in the United Kingdom. It’s still unclear why someone as high-ranking as Downer was meeting with such a minor Trump aide. Papadopoulos got to gossiping and passed along what he’d heard about the Russians and Clinton. More than two months after that, following news that the DNC had been hacked, Downer related to the U.S. government what he’d heard from Papadopoulos. A few days after that, July 31, 2016, the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe into Trump officials.
This is the “origin” story, the FBI’s public explanation of how it came to spy on a presidential campaign. The FBI only leaked this version of events to its media scribes after it stood accused of using the dossier to launch its probe, and there are many reasons to doubt it is the whole truth. But even if you buy the Papadopoulos-launched-it-all claim, the FBI would be hard-pressed to argue that this one episode warranted a full-fledged counterintelligence investigation.
Papadopoulos, like Page, was largely peripheral to the campaign. He believed his task was to improve U.S.-Russia relations and spent time attempting to facilitate meetings between Trump officials and Russians—but uniformly struck out. Add to this that the FBI had no real evidence of wrongdoing. They had a game of telephone. A non-Russian professor repeated something to a third-tier campaign aide, who repeated it to a random diplomat, who repeated it to the FBI. On this basis, we get a probe of a presidential campaign?
And something clearly got lost in the repetition. The FBI, Mueller, and the media have steadfastly maintained that Papadopoulos mattered because Mifsud told him about “thousands of emails” pertaining to Clinton months before the DNC hack. This, they said, suggested that Mifsud had intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s efforts, before that hack became public. Yet the “thousands of emails” could just have easily been a reference to the e-mails Clinton had kept on (and then deleted from) her private server while she was secretary of state—e-mails that were the subject of rampant public speculation at that time.
Meanwhile, two former colleagues of Mifsud recently wrote a book, The Faking of Russia-gate, in which they claimed to have interviewed the now-hiding professor. They write that he stated “vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.” Papadopoulos, for his part, says he doesn’t remember sharing any relevant information with Downer. And in an interview with The Australian, Downer was emphatic that Papadopoulos did not offer him any specifics. “He didn’t say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to [Clinton],” said Mr. Downer. “He didn’t say what it was.” If this is true, the FBI was told only that Papadopoulos had heard the Russians had something on Hillary—no mention of e-mails. This would make their decision to launch an entire investigation even more absurd.
Also disconcerting is the means by which the Downer information reached the FBI. The United States is part of Five Eyes, an intelligence network that includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Five Eyes agreement is that any intelligence of note to partners is sent to, handled by, and transmitted by the country that gathered it. This helps guarantee that information is securely managed by trained professionals and subject to quality control; the system exists in part to guard against political manipulation. If Downer had concerns about Papadopoulos, his obligation was to report to Australian intelligence and let them handle it. But we know it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI.
Instead, Downer decided to convey his information directly to the U.S. embassy in London. Meaning, to the Obama State Department. The Downer details landed with the embassy’s then–chargé d’affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who had previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Clinton’s State Department. This raises the alarming prospect that Obama political players were given this information early on, and added pressure to the FBI to act. It’s hard to otherwise explain the Bureau’s decision to go DEFCON 1 on the basis of such pathetically thin gruel.
* * *
What did the FBI actually have at the end of July 2016, on the eve of its official probe? It had suspicions about Page and Manafort, though (as made clear by the Mueller report) no real evidence. It had a dossier of wild accusations, though it was aware this had come from the Clinton camp. It had a tip
from a foreign diplomat about the knowledge of a minor campaign aide, though the details amounted to little. All of this might have warranted—again—a defensive briefing for the Trump campaign, or even some follow-up. Instead, the FBI did something it had never done before, breaking perhaps one of the biggest rules of all: It launched a counterintelligence investigation into a domestic political campaign.
The public has never fully appreciated how dishonest this was. The FBI didn’t have a crime to investigate. Page had broken no laws in going to Moscow; people do it all the time. Papadopoulos had broken no laws in talking to a work colleague who had Russian associates. The FBI didn’t even have evidence to suggest a crime. Mueller ultimately contemplated more than a dozen statutes under which he might charge those Trump team members who interacted with Russians—from conspiracy laws to campaign finance rules—and couldn’t find anything that stuck. The FBI knew it would have a hard time in a criminal investigation getting courts to sign off on anything, given its pathetic evidence and given the protections the U.S. Constitution affords U.S. citizens. So it instead launched a counterintelligence probe, which gave it greater latitude—additional tools and additional secrecy—to go after the Trump campaign.
When then–House Intelligence Chairman Nunes found out in January 2017 that the FBI was engaged specifically in a counterintelligence operation, he was stunned. He had for years sat on the committee charged with reviewing and updating the laws that give the intelligence community surveillance and metadata tools. “I would never have conceived of the FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign,” he told me. “If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we’d have specifically written: ‘Don’t do that.’”
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