Tag: Steele Dossier

Trump’s attempts to smear Christopher Steele just hit a roadblock

Trump’s attempts to smear Christopher Steele just hit a roadblock

For months, President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to smear Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Steele Dossier, as someone bent on bringing down the president through lies and deceit.

But after this week’s revelations, they might have to try a new strategy.

As Reuters first reported, attorneys from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s Office grilled Steele early last month in the U.K. A report in Politico added that the two-day interview took a total of 16 hours.

View the complete July 10 article by Casey Michel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Justice Dept. Watchdog Is Preparing to Deliver Verdict on the Russia Investigation

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Inside a London office building in early June, three investigators for the Justice Department’s inspector general took a crucial step toward clearing the political fallout from the Russia investigation: They spent two days interviewing Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose now-infamous dossier of purported links between Trump associates and Russia ended up in the hands of the F.B.I. ahead of the 2016 election.

The investigators pored over Mr. Steele’s old memos and his contemporaneous notes from meetings with F.B.I. agents in the fall of 2016, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They asked Mr. Steele to explain in detail how he had validated his sources inside Russia, how he communicated with them, and how he decided which of their claims to include in his reports. They spoke at length about Mr. Steele’s work with the F.B.I. on other Russia-related investigations and his contacts with a senior Justice Department official.

The interview was a key step in the investigation by the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, into the facts underlying a bitter partisan feud: Did F.B.I. officials do anything wrong in 2016 when they sought to understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia — including how they used information from Mr. Steele?

View the complete July 9 article by Adam Goldman, Charlie Savage and Matthew Rosenberg on The New York Times website here.

Tech Firm in Steele Dossier May Have Been Used by Russian Spies

WASHINGTON — Aleksej Gubarev is a Russian technology entrepreneur who runs companies in Europe and the United States that provide cut-rate internet service. But he is best known for his appearance in 2016 in a dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

Mr. Gubarev’s companies, the dossier claimed, used “botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.”

On Thursday, new evidence emerged that indicated that internet service providers owned by Mr. Gubarev appear to have been used to do just that: A report by a former F.B.I. cyberexpert unsealed in a federal court in Miami found evidence that suggests Russian agents used networks operated by Mr. Gubarev to start their hacking operation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

[Read the report here.]

View the complete March 14 article by Matthew Rosenberg on The New York Times website here.

The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective

President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin prior to the 2018 Helsinki Summit. Credit: kremlin.ru

The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele remains a subject of fascination—or, depending on your perspective, scorn. Indeed, it was much discussed during former FBI Director Jim Comey’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 7. Published almost two years ago by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, the document received significant public attention, first for its lurid details regarding Donald Trump’s pre-presidential alleged sexual escapades in Russia and later for its role in forming part of the basis for the government’s application for a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page.

Our interest in revisiting the compilation that has come to be called the “Steele Dossier” concerns neither of those topics, at least not directly. Rather, we returned to the document because we wondered whether information made public as a result of the Mueller investigation—and the passage of two years—has tended to buttress or diminish the crux of Steele’s original reporting.

The dossier is actually a series of reports—16 in all—that total 35 pages. Written in 2016, the dossier is a collection of raw intelligence. Steele neither evaluated nor synthesized the intelligence. He neither made nor rendered bottom-line judgments. The dossier is, quite simply and by design, raw reporting, not a finished intelligence product.

View the complete December 14 article by Sarah Grant and Chuck Rosenberg on the Lawfareblog.com website here.

The unsupported claim that James Clapper tipped Jake Tapper about the dossier

The following article by Glenn Kessler was posted on the Washington Post website May 3, 2018:

Conservative news outlets have theorized that former director of national intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about his communications with Tapper. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“It’s an incredible development. Now, the Intel Committee’s report found that Clapper, quote, admitted to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in private testimony that he briefed CNN’s Jake Tapper in early January of 2017. This was shortly before Trump’s inauguration. Tapper along with two other journalists, so-called journalists from CNN, published a report detailing how Trump was briefed about the Steele dossier. And then a short time later, James Clapper, oh, he’s hired by fake news CNN as an analyst. You connect the dots.”
— Sean Hannity, on his Fox News television show, April 30, 2018

Reporters often try to connect the dots. But sometimes, dots can’t really be connected – or they are misplaced.

Continue reading “The unsupported claim that James Clapper tipped Jake Tapper about the dossier”

Michael Cohen abruptly drops lawsuit claiming Steele dossier is a lie

The following article by Aaron Rupar was posted on the ThinkProgress website April 19, 2018:

The move comes days after Trump’s longtime attorney was the target of an FBI raid.

Michael Cohen exits the US Dist Court Southern District of New York, April 16, 2018 in New York City. Credit: Drew Angerer, Getty Images

Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has abruptly dropped a defamation lawsuit he filed against BuzzFeed for publishing an unverified intelligence dossier put together by former British spy Christopher Steele that details the Trump campaign’s alleged links with the Putin regime.

The timing of Cohen’s move to drop the lawsuit is interesting, for at least a couple reasons. First, it comes the week after FBI agents acting on a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller raided Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room. Cohen’s decision to drop the lawsuit suggests agents may have seized evidence that will make it hard to him to maintain that the dossier is “fake” and a “lie filled document,” as he claimed on Twitter when he announced the “defamation action” in January.

Continue reading “Michael Cohen abruptly drops lawsuit claiming Steele dossier is a lie”

The memo, the dossier and the political weaponization of misinformation

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website February 2, 2018:

The Russia probe got its start with a drunken conversation, an ex-spy, WikiLeaks and a distracted FBI. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

There are few things that warm the cockles of President Trump’s most ardent opponents like the Steele dossier. Right there on paper is the alleged Russia conspiracy they had convinced themselves existed, complete with salacious scenes from Russian hotel rooms and shadowy meetings between Trump allies and Russian officials.

But as we’re finding out this week, while spreading unverified information that conforms to your preexisting beliefs may be cathartic, it can also be weaponized against you. And that is exactly what’s happening with the impending release of the Nunes memo. Continue reading “The memo, the dossier and the political weaponization of misinformation”

Week 34: The Dossier Strikes Back

The following article by Jack Shafer was posted on the Politico website January 13, 2018:

Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

After ‘Sneaky Dianne’ releases 10 hours of testimony, the salacious report gets a boost of respectability.

The Steele Dossier—the sensational opposition-research document that alleged, among other things, that Donald Trump once performed urinary vandalism on a Moscow hotel-room bed—has just celebrated the first anniversary of its release by BuzzFeed. Now, thanks to the publication of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who commissioned the research, the document has reflowered to daub the press with its perfume once more.

At the beginning of the year, Simpson called for the release of his testimony in a New York Times op-ed, writing, “We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties.” Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) seconded him at the beginning of the week, and beseeched committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) to do just that. They called for GOP attacks on Simpson and dossier author Christopher Steele to stop and for the selective leaks of the Simpson testimony to cease. Continue reading “Week 34: The Dossier Strikes Back”