Donald Trump–Russia dossier

The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report written from June to December 2016, containing allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. Five years later, it was described by mainstream media as "largely discredited", "deeply flawed", and "largely unverified". Some aspects of the dossier have been corroborated, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton, and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and spies.

The dossier, leaked by '' BuzzFeed News'' in January 2017, without its author's permission, is an unfinished compilation of raw intelligence based on information from initially anonymous sources known to the author, counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele. Steele, a former head of the Russia Desk for British intelligence (MI6), was writing the report for the private investigative firm Fusion GPS, who were paid by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The dossier's 17 reports allege that Trump campaign members and Russian operatives had conspired to cooperate in Russia's election interference to benefit Trump. It also alleges that Russia sought to damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy. ''BuzzFeed''s decision to publish the reports without verifying their allegations was criticized by journalists but their decision was also defended in a court statement explaining that ''BuzzFeed''s action was for the public good as the public had a right to know so it could "exercise effective oversight of the government".

In June 2016, Fusion GPS subcontracted Steele's firm to compile the dossier. DNC officials denied knowing their attorney had contracted with Fusion GPS, and Steele asserted he was not aware the Clinton campaign was the recipient of his research until months after he contracted with Fusion GPS. While compiling the dossier, Steele passed some of his findings to both British and American intelligence services.

The intelligence community and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations, that Trump denounced as fake news. The U.S. intelligence community took the allegations seriously, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated every line of the dossier and identified and spoke with at least two of Steele's sources. The Mueller Report contained passing references to some of the dossier's allegations but little mention of its more sensational claims.

Many allegations in the dossier have been dismissed by authorities or remain unverified. While the dossier played a central role in the seeking of FISA warrants on Carter Page, it did not play any role in the intelligence community's assessment about Russian actions in the 2016 election, and it was not the trigger for the opening of the Russia investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election. The dossier is a factor in several conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his supporters in the media and Congress.

History

The opposition research conducted by Fusion GPS on Donald Trump was in two distinct operations, each with a different client. The first research operation, from October 2015 to May 2016, was domestic research funded by ''The Washington Free Beacon''. The second operation, from April 2016 to December 2016, was funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Only the second operation involved the foreign research used to create the dossier. From April 2016 into early May, the ''Washington Free Beacon'' and the Clinton Campaign/DNC were independently both clients of Fusion GPS.

An "agreed chronology" of dossier-related events is published in Appendix C of the ''Gubarev v Orbis'' case of October 30, 2020.

Research funded by conservative website

In October 2015, before the official start of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, the founders of Fusion GPS were seeking political work and wrote an email to "a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, ndthey were hired". He arranged for them to use ''The Washington Free Beacon'', an American conservative political journalism website, for their general opposition research on several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump. It is primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer. The ''Free Beacon'' and Singer were "part of the conservative never-Trump movement". Although Singer was a big supporter of Marco Rubio, Rubio denied any involvement in Fusion GPS's initial research and hiring.

Early in their investigation, they received help from investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who gave them his files on Trump. They contained findings about "Trump's past dealings, including tax and bankruptcy problems, potential ties to organized crime, and numerous legal entanglements. They also revealed that Trump had an unusually high number of connections to Russians with questionable backgrounds."

For months, Fusion GPS gathered information about Trump, focusing on his business and entertainment activities. When Trump became the presumptive nominee on May 3, 2016, the conservative donor stopped funding the research on him.

In October 2017, the ''Free Beacon'' issued a statement:

Although the source of the Steele dossier's funding had already been reported correctly over a year before, and the ''Free Beacon'' had issued a statement to this effect in October 2017, a February 2, 2018, story by the Associated Press (AP) contributed to confusion about its funding by stating that the dossier "was initially funded" by the ''Washington Free Beacon'', so the AP posted a correction the next day: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it."

By the spring of 2016, researchers at Fusion GPS had become so alarmed by what they had already learned about Trump that they felt the need "to do what they could to keep Trump out of the White House".

Research funded by Democrats produces dossier

The second operation of opposition research was indirectly funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign, working through their attorney of record, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie. In an October 2017 letter, Perkins Coie general counsel Matthew Gehringer described how, in March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie and, knowing the Clinton campaign and the DNC were its clients, inquired whether its clients wished to pay Fusion GPS "to continue research regarding then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, research that Fusion GPS had conducted for one or more other clients during the Republican primary contest." In April 2016, Elias hired Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson had some reservations, as he did not like the idea of helping Hillary Clinton. In an email, Simpson said "The only way I could see working for HRC is if it is against Trump."

In June 2016, as part of its work for Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS hired Orbis Business Intelligence, a private British intelligence firm, to look into connections between Trump and Russia. Orbis co-founder Christopher Steele, a retired British MI6 officer with expertise in Russian matters, was hired as a subcontractor to do the job. Prior to his work on the dossier, Steele had been a paid informant for the FBI for information unrelated to the Russia investigation.

In total, Perkins Coie paid Fusion GPS $1.02million in fees and expenses, of which Fusion GPS paid Orbis $168,000 to produce the dossier. The DNC and Clinton campaign disclosed the total amount paid to Perkins Coie on campaign finance reports. In March 2022, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the DNC $105,000 and the Clinton campaign $8,000 for misreporting those fees and expenses as "legal services" and "legal and compliance consulting" rather than "opposition research".

Orbis was hired between June and November 2016, and Steele produced 16 reports during that time, with a 17th report added in December. The reports were like "prepublication notes" based on information from Steele's sources, and were not released as a fully vetted and "finished news article". Steele believes 70–90 percent of the dossier is accurate, a view shared by Simpson.

Steele delivered his reports individually to Fusion GPS as one- to three-page numbered reports. The first report, dated June 20, 2016, was sent to Washington by courier and hand-delivered to Fusion GPS. The names of the sources were redacted and replaced with descriptions to help Fusion judge their credibility.

Luke Harding wrote:

Steele has said he soon found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government". According to his sources, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit". According to Harding, "Steele was shocked by the extent of collusion his sources were reporting", and told his friends: "For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience." Steele felt what he had unearthed "was something of huge significance, way above party politics". American reporter Howard Blum described Steele's rationale for becoming a whistleblower: "The greater good trumps all other concerns."

On his own initiative, Steele decided to also pass the information to British and American intelligence services because he believed the findings were a matter of national security for both countries. In 2018, Steele told a UK parliamentary investigation that Theresa May's British government covered up the evidence he provided them of Trump's Russian ties and took no actions, and that Boris Johnson suppressed a report about the intelligence in the dossier that was prepared by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee. After long delay, the report was published on July 21, 2020.

According to Simpson's testimony, Steele, who enjoyed a good working reputation "for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence, approached the FBI because he was concerned that Trump, then a candidate, was being blackmailed by Russia, and he became "very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat". Steele believed the intelligence community "needed urgently to know—if it didn't already—that the next possible U.S. president was potentially under the sway of Russia".

In early July 2016, Steele called seasoned FBI agent Michael Gaeta, who was stationed in Rome, and asked him to come to London so he could show him his findings. Because he was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome, Gaeta sought and was granted approval for the trip from Victoria Nuland, who was then the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. When he arrived in London on July 5, 2016, he met with Steele at his office, and he was given a copy of Steele's first report, dated June 20, 2016 (Report 80). His reaction was "shock and horror". Alarmed by what he read, Gaeta remarked, "I have to show this to headquarters".

As Nuland later shared, "In the middle of July, when he teelewas doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, 'This is not in our purview.' This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That's something for the FBI to investigate." Shortly after, in July, the report was sent to an agent with expertise in criminal organizations and organized crime at the FBI's New York field office—essentially, the wrong person to handle a counterintelligence investigation. According to Nancy LeTourneau, political writer for the ''Washington Monthly'', the report "was languishing in the FBI's New York field office" for two months, and "was finally sent to the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C." in mid-September 2016.

In August 2016, the FBI asked Steele for "all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources". In October 2016, Steele "described the sources' access, but did not provide names" to the FBI. By August 22, 2017, Steele had provided them with the names of the sources for the allegations in the dossier.

Meanwhile, in the July to September time frame, according to ''The Washington Post'', CIA Director John Brennan had started an investigation with a secret task force "composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI". At the same time, he was busy creating his own dossier of material documenting that "Russia was not only attempting to interfere in the 2016 election, they were doing so in order to elect Donald Trump... e entire intelligence community was on alert about this situation at least two months before he dossierbecame part of the investigation." The "Steele dossier has so far proven to be fairly accurate", LeTourneau wrote.

In early August, Steele was summoned to Rome where he gave a full briefing to four American FBI officials about the report. At that time, he handed over the June 20 and July 26 reports.

During its intense questioning of Steele, the FBI mentioned their own discoveries of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia and asked Steele about Papadopoulos, but he said he knew nothing about him. The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day", but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information". In October 2022, during questioning from Special Counsel John Durham, Brian Auten, a supervisory counterintelligence analyst with the FBI, testified that, shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" if he could corroborate allegations in the dossier, but that Steele could not do so. Steele has disputed this description: "And to correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to ‘prove up’ our Trump-Russia reporting. Rather, we were told there were substantial funds to resettle sources in the US if they were prepared to testify in public. Understandably they were not."

The subsequent public release of the dossier stopped discussions between Steele and the FBI. Simpson testified that "Steele wasn't paid by the FBI, but was possibly reimbursed for a trip to Rome to meet with FBI officials." According to Mayer, Steele asked the FBI to cover his travel expenses to Rome, but he received nothing. The Inspector General's report later confirmed that the FBI had initially offered to pay Steele $15,000 for his trip to Rome, but when the FBI dropped Steele as a confidential human source because he had shared information with a third party "in late October 2016" (''Mother Jones'' magazine), the payment was halted. Peter Strzok reported that:

In September, Steele met with Jonathan Winer, who was then the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, whom he had known since 2009. In a 2018 editorial for ''The Washington Post'', Winer recounted that during their meeting in Washington, he was allowed to review Steele's reports, but not to keep a copy: "I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with ictoriaNuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material," he wrote. Later in September, Winer discussed the report with Sidney Blumenthal, who revealed he had received similar information from Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Winer met with Steele again in late September and gave him a copy of Shearer's report, later known as the "second dossier".

On September 19, 2016, Steele's handling agent sent six of Steele's reports (80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102) to the Crossfire Hurricane team, that had been operational since July 31, 2016. This was the first time they and their leader, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterespionage Section, Peter Strzok, received any of Steele's reporting. Some reports referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. The IG Report says this material "became an important part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the FBI seeking FISA authority targeting one of the Crossfire Hurricane subjects, Carter Page."

On October 28, 2016, days before the election, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered Hillary Clinton emails. Simpson and Fritsch described their reaction: "Comey's bombshell prompted the Fusion partners to decide they needed to do what they could to expose the FBI's probe of Trump and Russia. It was Hail Mary time." The founders of Fusion GPS were very upset by a misleading November 1, 2016, ''New York Times'' article "published a week before the election with the headline: 'Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia'. In fact, Russia ''was'' meddling in the election to help Trump win, the U.S. intelligence community would later conclude..."

Simpson later said that "Steele severed his contacts with heFBI before the election following public statements by the FBI that it had found no connection between the Trump campaign and Russia and concerns that he FBIwas being 'manipulated for political ends by the Trump people'." Steele had become frustrated with the FBI, whom he believed failed to investigate his reports, choosing instead to focus on the investigation into Clinton's emails. According to ''The Independent'', Steele came to believe there was a "cabal" inside the FBI, particularly its New York field office linked to Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani, because it blocked any attempts to investigate the links between Trump and Russia.

What the DNC, Clinton campaign, and Steele knew

According to Fusion GPS's co-owners, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, they did not tell Steele who their ultimate clients were, only that Steele was "working for a law firm", and they "gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: 'Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?'" In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Simpson said that "it was Fusion GPS's idea to pursue overseas ties—that research was not directed by Perkins Coie, the DNC, or the Clinton Campaign".

Jane Mayer reported that when the Clinton campaign "indirectly employed" Steele, Elias created a "legal barrier" by acting as a "firewall" between the campaign and Steele. Thus, any details were protected by attorney–client privilege and work-product privileges. "Fusion briefed only Elias on the reports, Simpson sent Elias nothing on paper—he was briefed orally", Mayer reported. In its application for a FISA warrant to survey Carter Page, the Department of Justice told the FISC that Simpson had not informed Steele of the motivation behind the research into Trump's ties with Russia. Steele testified to Congress that he did not know the Clinton campaign was the source of the payments "because he was retained by Fusion GPS". By "late July 2016", "several months" after signing the contract with Fusion GPS, Steele became aware that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were the ultimate clients.

A spokesperson for the DNC said neither Tom Perez nor "the new leadership of the DNC were... involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization." A spokesperson for Perkins Coie said the campaign and the DNC were unaware Fusion GPS "had been hired to conduct the research". ''The Washington Post'' reported that it is not clear how much of the research Elias received from Fusion GPS he shared with the campaign and the DNC. It is also not clear who in those organizations knew about the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele, but one person "close to the matter" said the organizations were "not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS's role". ''The New York Times'' revealed that earlier in 2017, "Mr. Elias had denied that he had possessed the dossier before the election." The Clinton campaign did not know about Steele or that he was sharing his findings with the FBI, and "one top Clinton campaign official" told Jane Mayer that "If I'd known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!"

The firewall was reportedly so effective even campaign principals John Podesta and Robby Mook did not know Steele was on the Democratic payroll until ''Mother Jones'' reported on the issue on October 31, 2016, in an article that did not name Steele. When the ''Mother Jones'' story broke, John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, said he was "stunned by the news that the FBI had launched a full-blown investigation into Trump, especially one that was informed by research underwritten by the Clinton campaign." Although they knew Perkins Coie had spent money for opposition research, neither Podesta nor campaign manager Robby Mook knew Steele was on the Democratic payroll. Mayer said they both maintain they "didn't read the dossier until ''BuzzFeed'' posted it online". She has also said that "the Clinton campaign never learned that Christopher Steele was on their payroll until it he dossierwas in the press." "Far from a secret campaign weapon, Steele turned out to be a secret kept from the campaign." In their 2019 book, the founders of Fusion GPS wrote "...that no one from Fusion ever met or talked with Clinton and that she herself 'had no idea who they were'."

Philip Bump wrote that the dossier "has never been shown to have informed the Clinton campaign's approach and that was not made public until shortly before Trump was inaugurated."

On February 15, 2022, ''The Washington Post'' reported: "So far, there is no evidence that the Clinton campaign directly managed the Steele reporting or leaks about it to the media."

Hints of existence

The founders of Fusion GPS have described how they did not hide the fact that they were researching Trump and Russia: "Fusion and Steele tried to alert U.S. law enforcement and the news media to the material they'd uncovered..." and their office became "something of a public reading room" for journalists seeking information. In September they arranged a private meeting between Steele and reporters from ''The Washington Post'', ''The New York Times'', ''The New Yorker'', ABC News, and other outlets. The results were disappointing, as none published any stories before the election.

Jane Mayer has described how, in "late summer, Fusion set up a series of meetings, at the Tabard Inn, in Washington, between Steele and a handful of national-security reporters.... Despite Steele's generally cool manner, he seemed distraught about the Russians' role in the election." Mayer attended one of the meetings. None of these news organizations ran any stories about the allegations at that time.

Before the election, only two news sources mentioned allegations that came from dossier reports. Steele had been in contact with both authors. These were a September 23, 2016, Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff that focused on Carter Page, and an article by David Corn on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, in ''Mother Jones'' magazine.

At the time, the FBI had assumed that the source for the Yahoo! article was someone, other than Steele, "who had received a copy of the dossier". The 2019 DOJ report by Michael Horowitz criticized the FBI for failing to ask Steele if he had a role in that Yahoo! article.

''Mother Jones'' story

By the third quarter of 2016, many news organizations knew about the existence of the dossier that had been described as an "open secret" among journalists, but chose not to publish information they could not confirm. ''Mother Jones'' was the first to report the existence of the dossier and that it was exclusively funded by Democrats.

By October 2016, Steele had compiled 33 pages (16 reports), and he then passed on what he had discovered to David Corn, a reporter from ''Mother Jones'' magazine. On October 31, 2016, a week before the election, ''Mother Jones'' reported that a former intelligence officer, whom they did not name, had produced a report based on Russian sources and turned it over to the FBI. The article disclosed some of the dossier's allegations:

Post-election events

After Trump's election on November 8, 2016, the Democratic client stopped paying for the investigation, but Steele continued working on the dossier for Fusion GPS. According to ''The Independent'', at that time, Simpson "reportedly spent his own money to continue the investigation". According to ''The New York Times'', after the election, Steele's dossier became one of Washington's "worst-kept secrets", and journalists worked to verify the allegations.

On November 18, 2016, Republican Senator John McCain, who had been informed about the alleged links between the Kremlin and Trump, met with former British ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada. Wood told McCain about the existence of the collected materials about Trump, and also vouched for Steele's professionalism and integrity.

According to Simpson's August 22, 2017, testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Steele and David J. Kramer, a longtime McCain aide and former U.S. State Department official working at Arizona State University, met each other at the Halifax forum and discussed the dossier. Kramer told Steele that McCain wanted to "ask questions about it at the FBI.... All we sort of wanted was for the government to do its job and we were concerned about whether the information that we provided previously had ever, you know, risen to the leadership level of the FBI."

Steele had agreed with Fusion GPS to deliver a hard copy of all 16 reports to McCain, that McCain received in early December from Kramer. On December 9, McCain met personally with FBI Director James Comey and gave him a copy of the dossier. On March 25, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain's, contradicted Trump's attacks against McCain and revealed that when McCain showed him the dossier, he had encouraged McCain to give the dossier to the FBI and that McCain acted appropriately. Graham described how he confronted Trump: "Senator McCain deserves better. There were some McCain people who took a piece of garbage and tried to go after Trump after the election. But I told the president it was not John McCain." Comey later confirmed that counterintelligence investigations were under way into possible links between Trump associates and Moscow.

After delivering his 16 reports to McCain, Steele received more information and composed the two-page "December memo", dated December 13. It mostly contained allegations against Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that Cohen later denied. In an April 2017 court filing, Steele revealed previously unreported information that he had given a copy of his last report to a "senior UK government national security official acting in his official capacity, on a confidential basis in hard copy form", because it "had implications for the national security of the US and the UK".

Both Simpson and Steele have denied providing the dossier to ''BuzzFeed''. Unsealed documents from the discovery process in Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev's defamation lawsuit revealed that David Kramer, an associate of John McCain, gave the dossier to ''BuzzFeed'' "in December 2016, weeks after the election", ''Fresh Air'' in what Fritsch has called an "ill-advised" Hail Mary pass. It was never intended that the dossier be public because it was unfinished raw intelligence and could have "compromised sources and methods". Steele was also worried about the safety of his source network, and he expressed concern that if Trump won the election, the new FBI director, and other agency heads appointed by Trump, might be more loyal to Trump "and could decide to take action against Steele and his source network".

Briefings of Obama and Trump

On January 5, 2017, the chiefs of four U.S. intelligence agencies briefed President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden about the Russian interference in the election and the existence of the dossier and its allegations.

On the afternoon of January 6, 2017, President-elect Trump and his transition team received a similar briefing in Trump Tower. All four of the top intelligence chiefs met with Trump and his transition team. They were Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers. They informed Trump of the Russian election interference, and Comey told them of "a piece of Steele's reporting that indicated Russia had files of derogatory information on both Clinton and the President-elect".

Then, according to a pre-arranged plan, Brennan, Clapper, and Rogers left, and Comey then asked to speak with Trump alone. Comey then informed Trump of the dossier and its allegations about salacious tapes held by the Russians. Comey later reported he was very nervous. The previous day, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security told Comey to "be very careful", "choose your words carefully", and then "get outta there". Trump became very defensive, and Comey described the meeting as "really weird". Trump later expressed that he felt James Comey was trying to blackmail him at the meeting in Trump Tower, held two weeks before the inauguration. In April 2018, Comey said he did not inform Trump the dossier was partly funded by Democrats because that "wasn't necessary for my goal, which was to alert him that we had this information".

The Mueller Report, published on April 18, 2019, contains a footnote that suggests that Trump may have heard that Russia had incriminating tapes of his behavior. On October 30, 2016, Michael Cohen had received a text from Giorgi Rtskhiladze reporting that he had successfully stopped the "flow of tapes from Russia". Rtskhiladze told investigators that these were compromising tapes of Trump, and Cohen told investigators he had spoken to Trump about the issue. Rtskhiladze later told investigators "he was told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen".

On December 14, 2018, the FBI released a document called "Annex A", that was "part of heRussia dossier summary" used to brief Trump and Obama. The FBI withheld parts of the synopsis on the grounds that it remained classified and "because it pertains to ongoing investigations or court proceedings, originated with a confidential source or describes confidential investigative techniques or procedures".

Two days after the publication of the dossier on January 10, 2017, James Clapper issued a statement describing the leaks in the press about their Trump Tower meeting with Trump as damaging to U.S. national security. The statement also included the non-committal wording that the U.S. intelligence community "has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions". This contradicted Trump's previous claim that Clapper had said the information in the dossier was false; Clapper's statement actually said the intelligence community had made no judgment on the truth of the information.

James Comey had disagreed with Clapper's wording, but Clapper's wording remained unchanged. Comey later told the Office of the Inspector General of his concerns at that time, because he believed the dossier to be more reliable than indicated in Clapper's non-committal statement:

Publication by ''BuzzFeed News''

On January 10, 2017, CNN reported that classified documents presented to Obama and Trump the previous week included allegations that Russian operatives possess "compromising personal and financial information" about Trump. CNN said it would not publish specific details on the reports because it had not "independently corroborated the specific allegations". Following the CNN report, '' BuzzFeed'' published a draft dossier that it said was the basis for the briefing, including unverified claims that Russian operatives had collected "embarrassing material" involving Trump that could be used to blackmail him. ''BuzzFeed'' said the information included "specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives".

''The New York Times'' commented: "Mr. Steele has made clear to associates that he always considered the dossier to be raw intelligence—not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation." Judge Craig Karsnitz described the purpose of the dossier: "An intelligence report is simply a report of information potentially relevant to an investigation. It can take many forms, be true or false, and can be used as opposition research and an intelligence report." Christopher Burrows, co-founder of Orbis Business Intelligence, does not consider it a "dossier", but "information that is referred to as 'raw intelligence' in intelligence circles.... a mixture of knowledge, rumor and hearsay.... intelligence agency would enrich the findings with data, test probabilities and write analyses. It's an elaborate process. But Steele is not an intelligence agency."

''BuzzFeed'' was harshly criticized by several mainstream media outlets for releasing the draft dossier without verifying its allegations. ''Washington Post'' columnist Margaret Sullivan called it "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump", while ''The New York Times'' noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources. ''BuzzFeed''s executive staff said the materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media" and argued that this justified public release. A judge in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia agreed with this reasoning when he threw out a libel suit against Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence.

The draft dossier's publication by ''BuzzFeed'' has always been defended by Jack Shafer, ''Politico''s senior media writer, as well as by Richard Tofel of ''ProPublica'' and the ''Columbia Journalism Review''. Shafer defended the public's right to know about the allegations against Trump, and saw a parallel in Judge Ungaro's ruling in the defamation suit filed by Aleksej Gubarev. Ungaro wrote that the "privilege exists to protect the media while they gather information needed for the public to exercise effective oversight of the government". She also noted that, before the FBI received any reports from Steele, they had "already opened a counterintelligence investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign".

In relation to a defamation lawsuit filed by Gubarev against ''BuzzFeed'', regarding their publication of the draft dossier, Senior Master Barbara Fontaine said Steele was "in many respects in the same position as a whistle-blower" because of his actions "in sending part of the dossier to Senator John McCain and a senior government national security official, and in briefing sections of the US media". She said that "it was not known who provided the dossier to ''BuzzFeed'' but Mr Steele's evidence was that he was 'horrified and remains horrified' that it was published at all, let alone without substantial redactions."

The founders of Fusion GPS felt so alarmed by what sources reported to Steele that they have defended the fact that they and Steele used intermediaries to pass dossier content to the authorities, but, regarding the publication by ''BuzzFeed'', if it had been up to them, "Steele's reporting never would have seen the light of day." They were also alarmed that the leak of the draft dossier would endanger sources, and Glenn Simpson immediately phoned Ken Bensinger at ''BuzzFeed'': "Take those fucking reports down right now! You are going to get people killed!"

Steele wrote:

Christopher Burrows said: "We didn't expect the findings on Russia to reach the public."

Format

When ''BuzzFeed'' published the dossier in January 2017, the individual reports were one to three pages long, numbered, and page numbers 1–35 had been handwritten at the bottom. All but one had a typed date at the bottom. Each of the first 16 reports (pre-election memoranda) was assigned a typed number in the heading between 80 and 135, but the numeric order didn't always match the chronological order. The 17th report, known as the "December memo", was numbered 166. Of the original reports numbered 1–166, only certain reports were used for the dossier, and it is unknown what happened with the content of the other reports: "For example, the first report is labeled as '080', with no indication given as to where the original 79 antecedents might have gone. The second report is then labeled '086', creating yet another mystery as to 81 through 85, and what content they might contain that would otherwise bolster or contextualize what came before or what follows."

Each report started with a page heading in the same style as the first one shown here:

Authorship and sources

The dossier is based on information from witting and unwitting anonymous sources known to counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele. Some were later revealed.

Christopher Steele

When CNN reported the existence of the dossier on January 10, 2017, it did not name the author of the dossier, but revealed that he was British. Steele concluded that his anonymity had been "fatally compromised", and, realizing it was "only a matter of time until his name became public knowledge", fled into hiding with his family in fear of "a prompt and potentially dangerous backlash against him from Moscow". His friends later reported that he feared assassination by Russians. ''The Wall Street Journal'' revealed Steele's name the next day, on January 11. Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, for whom Steele worked at the time the dossier was authored, and its director Christopher Burrows, a counterterrorism specialist, would not confirm or deny that Orbis had produced the dossier. On March 7, 2017, as some members of the U.S. Congress were expressing interest in meeting with or hearing testimony from Steele, he reemerged after weeks in hiding, appearing publicly on camera and stating, "I'm really pleased to be back here working again at the Orbis's offices in London today."

Called by the media a "highly regarded Kremlin expert" and "one of MI6's greatest Russia specialists", Steele formerly worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for 22 years, including four years at the British embassy in Moscow, and headed MI6's Russia Desk for three years at the end of his MI6 career. He entered MI6 in 1987, directly after his graduation from Cambridge University. He currently works for Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, a private intelligence company he co-founded in London.

Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Moscow, has vouched for Steele's reputation. He views Steele as a "very competent professional operator... I take the report seriously. I don't think it's totally implausible." He also said "the report's key allegation—that Trump and Russia's leadership were communicating via secret back channels during the presidential campaign—was eminently plausible". FBI investigators reportedly treat Steele "as a peer", whose experience as a trusted Russia expert has included assisting the Justice Department, British prime ministers, and at least one U.S. president.

Steele's biases and motivations toward Trump appear to have changed over time. Starting in 2007, many years before he started his opposition research on Trump, he repeatedly met Ivanka Trump over several years, had a "friendly relationship" with her, and was "favorably disposed" to the Trump family. They even discussed the possibility of the Trump Organization using the services of Orbis Business Intelligence, but no arrangements were made. Simpson has also confirmed that "there was no pre-existing animus toward Trump by Steele or Fusion".

Later, as Steele was preparing the dossier before the 2016 election, Bruce Ohr said Steele told him he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president", attitudes that have been described by Julian Sanchez as "entirely natural, not suggestive of preexisting bias", considering Steele believed his own reporting. Steele has disputed Ohr's statement, and he told interviewers for Inspector General Horowitz that Ohr's wording was a paraphrase of his sentiments and not an exact quote, and the IG Report continues: "Steele told us that based on what he learned during his research he was concerned that Trump was a national security risk and he had no particular animus against Trump otherwise." Steele told the FBI that he "did not begin his investigation with any bias against Trump, but based on the information he learned during the investigation became very concerned about the consequences of a Trump presidency."

Steele first became a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI in 2013 in connection with the investigation in the 2015 FIFA corruption case, but he considered the relationship as contractual. He said the relationship "was never really resolved and both sides turned a blind eye to it. It was not really ideal." Later, the Inspector General report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation discusses "divergent expectations about Steele's conduct in connection with his election reporting", as Steele considered his first duty to his paying clients, and not to the FBI. The Inspector General's report states that "Steele contends that he was never a CHS for the FBI but rather that his consulting firm had a contractual relationship with the FBI." Steele said "he never recalled being told that he was a CHS and that he never would have accepted such an arrangement,..." This divergence in expectations was a factor that "ultimately resulted in the FBI formally closing Steele as a CHS in November 2016 (although... the FBI continued its relationship with Steele through Ohr)."

On May 3, 2021, ''The Daily Telegraph'' reported that Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence, using new sources not used for the original dossier, continued to supply the FBI with raw intelligence during the Trump presidency. During an interview with the FBI in September 2017, Steele informed the FBI that Orbis had "four discrete, 'hermetically-sealed' main agent networks". His Primary sub-source for the dossier was no longer "active" at the time of the interview with FBI agents, but that another "main agent network is up and running and is now starting to get good information". This resulted in "a second dossier for the FBI on Donald Trump". It included further claims of Russian election meddling; "alleged Russian interference linked to Mr Trump and his associates"; claims about the "existence of further sex tapes"; and "further details of Mr Manafort's alleged Russian contacts".

Risk of contamination with Russian disinformation considered

In 2019, during Trump's first impeachment inquiry, national security expert Fiona Hill stated Steele may have been "played" by the Russians to spread disinformation.

The Inspector General's investigative team examined how seriously the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team had considered "whether Steele's election reports, or aspects of them, were the product of a Russian disinformation campaign". Bill Priestap explained to the OIG that by May 2017, after examining several possibilities for how disinformation could affect Steele's reporting, the FBI "didn't have any indication whatsoever that the Russians were running a disinformation campaign through the Steele election reporting". Priestap further explained that "the Russians ... favored Trump, they're trying to denigrate Clinton ... ndI don't know why you'd run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side." The IG Report said Steele explained how sophisticated the Russians were at planting and controlling misinformation, but Steele "had no evidence that his reporting was 'polluted' with Russian disinformation". The inspector general's report ultimately concluded "that more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele's reporting".

Steele's sources

The Inspector General's report stated that "Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting." Instead, the report found that Steele relied on a "Primary Sub-source", later revealed as Igor Danchenko, who "used a network of urthersub-sources to gather the information that was relayed to Steele".

In an Alfa-Bank lawsuit, Steele revealed that he "did not rely on Danchenko alone, instead obtaining information from "one main source and a couple of subsidiary sources". According to Steele: "The dossier was intelligence obtained from 3 sources and approximately 20 sub-sources."

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