Dossier author Christopher Steele
Late Friday night, the FBI released a heavily redacted Christopher Steele document that James Comey used to brief then-President elect Donald Trump and former President Obama.
The document, first obtained by Politico through a FOIA lawsuit, shows the FBI describing Steele as an “FBI source” who was working for “private clients,” which is a flat out lie being that he was working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC.
Republicans have long argued that the FBI relied heavily, if not solely on Christopher Steele’s uncorroborated Russia dossier to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign and went to great lengths to conceal it was funded by Hillary and the DNC — The FBI even hid this information from the FISA judges.
The 2-page document further proves Republicans have been right all along.
On January 6th, 2017, just days before Buzzfeed would publish the 35-page Russia dossier in full, James Comey traveled to the Trump Tower to brief then-President elect Donald Trump on the Steele dossier and he hid the fact that Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for the fraudulent document.
Comey lied to Trump’s face and told him not to worry about the dossier and only disclosed the salacious parts in the document claiming Trump had a wild night with prostitutes in Moscow — Comey told Trump he was not under investigation. Comey said this after the dossier had already been used to obtain the initial FISA warrant on Carter Page.
The two-page heavily redacted memo labeled “Annex A” does not identify Christopher Steele and keeps his name redacted:
“An FBI source [redacted] volunteered highly politically sensitive information [redacted] on Russian influence efforts aimed at the US presidential election,”
“The source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI.”
“The source’s reporting appears to have been acquired by multiple Western press organizations starting in October.”
So who were these unidentified sources that Christopher Steele used?
The FISA warrant applications only disclosed that Christopher Steele was working for a person who opposed Donald Trump, there was no information given to identify Steele was being paid by Hillary Clinton, Fusion GPS or the DNC.
Steele was officially fired by the FBI on November 1st of 2016 over his contacts with the media which violated protocol for “confidential human sources,” however, Steele continued to provide intel through DOJ official Bruce Ohr who was acting as a backchannel.
Watch: In February, Jay Sekulow talks about a secret meeting Comey had with Susan Rice, Barack Obama and Sally Yates ONE DAY before he briefed Trump on the dossier.
Trump attorney @JaySekulow ‘Comey briefed Trump on dossier at Trump Tower one day after Susan Rice secret meeting with Obama, Comey and Yates’ pic.twitter.com/Sc3YULXPPP
— Cristina Laila (@cristinalaila1) February 13, 2018
Screenshot of FBI document — Page One:
Page two is completely redacted:
