The FBI “cited extensively” from a Yahoo news report in its initial application to the FISA court that turned out to be based in part on information Steele leaked to the reporter, Michael Isikoff. A news story purporting to corroborate the dossier actually came directly from the dossier. After Steele was fired for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, an independent unit inside the FBI reviewed his reporting and assessed the document as “minimally corroborated.” FBI Director James Comey later referred to the dossier as “salacious and unverified” in testimony before Congress. The head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division assessed corroboration of the dossier as in its “infancy” when the first surveillance application was submitted to the FISA court in October. The dossier had not been independently verified. They learned shortly after the election he told a senior DOJ official in September 2016 that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The FBI noted this indication of Steele’s bias at the time and in following official files, but never disclosed it to the FISA court.
The FBI also had reason to believe Steele might be politically biased. Instead, the bureau used his history of credible reporting in the FISA application to firm up their argument for a warrant. Yet the FBI never disclosed to the FISA court any issues with Steele’s credibility, the memo says, even after they fired him because he broke their trust. He should have been fired sooner for other unauthorized disclosures to the press, but he lied about them to the FBI, which delayed their discovery of this fact. Steele was terminated as a source to the FBI after he disclosed his relationship with the bureau to the press in October 2016.
The FBI terminated Steele as a source for “what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations.” They didn’t mention the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any political party in the first application for a warrant, or in any of the three applications to renew the warrant, according to the memo. The FBI and DOJ knew this, but didn’t tell the FISA court that Trump’s rival campaign paid for the document they were submitting as a basis for spying on a member of Trump’s campaign. The Clinton campaign and the DNC were the sole source of funds to the opposition research firm for the entire duration of Steele’s work on the dossier.
The dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton and The Democratic National Committee.Īlthough the false claim that Republicans helped pay for the dossier is still circulating, the dossier was commissioned by Fusion GPS only after Republican funding ceased. Here are five things the FBI and DOJ never told the court when asking for multiple warrants, according to the memo.
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