what keeps getting overlooked and not mentioned as much.....it was all started by the republicans!
these same conservatives who are such staunch supporters are the very ones that started this and wanted to burn trump to begin with...but now they love him
Trump–Russia dossier
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Trump–Russia dossier, also known as the
Steele dossier,
[1] is a
private intelligence dossier of 17 memos that were consecutively written from June to December 2016
[2] by
Christopher Steele, a former
British intelligence (MI6) officer. It contains allegations of misconduct and conspiracy between the
Donald Trump campaign and the
Russian government before and during the
2016 U.S. presidential election, much of it detailing alleged cooperation between the campaign and Russians to
interfere in the election to benefit Trump.
[3] The contents of the dossier were published in full by
BuzzFeed on January 10, 2017.
[4] Several mainstream media outlets have criticized
BuzzFeed's decision to publish the dossier.
[5][6][7]
Some of
the dossier's allegations have been confirmed, while others have yet to be proved or disproved.
[8][9] Some claims may require access to classified information for verification.
[10] The media,
intelligence community, as well as most experts have treated the dossier with caution, while Trump himself denounced the report as "
fake news". In February 2017, some details related to conversations between foreign nationals were independently verified.
[11] As of December 2017
[update], the dossier's allegations of collusion have not been corroborated.
[12][13]
The dossier and the separate investigation preceding its creation were both part of
opposition research on Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. The American research firm
Fusion GPS was hired for both investigations. The first investigation into Trump was initially funded by a conservative political website,
The Washington Free Beacon, before Steele was involved.
After Trump emerged as the probable Republican nominee, attorney
Marc Elias of the
Perkins Coie law firm retained Fusion GPS to investigate Trump on behalf of the
Democratic National Committee and
Clinton presidential campaign. Fusion GPS later subcontracted Steele to research and compile the dossier.
[14] Following Trump's election as president, funding from the Democrats ceased, but Steele continued working on the report, with financing coming directly from
Glenn R. Simpson of Fusion GPS.
[15] The completed dossier and its information was then passed on to British and American intelligence services.
[16]
Allegations
The dossier contains multiple allegations, some of which are currently unverified and others for which possible verification is classified.
[10] Natasha Bertrand has stated that it "alleges serious misconduct and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia's government", and that, quoting the dossier, the "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul Manafort."
[17]
The memos allege that Russia has been cultivating a relationship with Trump for decades, that the
Kremlin favored Trump in the U.S. presidential election, and
took various actions during the 2016 election to promote his candidacy and oppose
Hillary Clinton's. The document claims that several of Trump's associates, in particular campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, Trump's personal attorney
Michael D. Cohen, and Trump foreign policy advisor
Carter Page, worked with Russian contacts to promote Trump's candidacy. Alleged activities include planning the
hack of
Democratic National Committee emails and their
subsequent leaking, arranging coverups and cash payments, and promising favorable policies toward Russia if Trump was elected. The document also claims that Russian operators possessed
compromising information about Trump which could make him subject to blackmail.
Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations, labeling the dossier as "discredited", "debunked", "fictitious", and "fake news".
[18]
History
The dossier and the investigations preceding it were part of
opposition research on Trump. The investigation into Trump was initially funded by
The Washington Free Beacon, an
American conservative political journalism web site, before Steele was involved, and was later funded by Democrats.
[19][20][2][21]
In October 2015, during the Republican primary campaign,
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website primarily funded by Republican donor
Paul Singer, hired the American research firm
Fusion GPS to conduct general opposition research on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.
[1] 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 Free Beacon stopped funding research on him.
[2][22][23]
In April 2016,
Marc Elias, a partner in the large Seattle-based law firm
Perkins Coie and head of its Political Law practice, hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. Elias was the attorney of record for the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the
Clinton presidential campaign.
[14] As part of their investigation, 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,
[2] was hired as a subcontractor to do the job.
[24] Orbis was hired between June and November 2016, and Steele produced 16 memos during that time.
[25]
According to Fusion GPS's co-owners,
Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, they did not tell Steele who their clients were and "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?'"
[26] In total, Perkins Coie paid Fusion GPS $1.02 million in fees and expenses, $168,000 of which was paid to Orbis and used by them to produce the dossier.
[27] Simpson has stated that Steele did not pay any of his sources.
[28][26]
According to Steele, he soon found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. He said that, according to his sources, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit." He described the finding as "an extraordinary situation" and concluded it was "sufficiently serious" for him to share it with the FBI, which he did in July 2016.
[29]
Steele delivered his report as a series of two- or three-page memos, starting in June 2016 and continuing through December. He continued his investigation even after the Democratic client stopped paying for it following Trump's election.
[2] After the election, Fusion GPS co-owner Simpson "reportedly spent his own money to continue the investigation".
[15]
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.
[30] According to the testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Steele approached the FBI because he was concerned that the then candidate, Donald Trump, was being blackmailed by Russia.
[31] However, he became frustrated with the
FBI, which he believed was failing to investigate his reports, choosing instead to focus on the
investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. According to
The Independent, Steele came to believe that there was a "cabal" inside the FBI, particularly its New York
field office linked to Trump advisor
Rudy Giuliani, which blocked any attempts to investigate the links between Trump and Russia.
[30] In October 2016, Steele had compiled 33 pages (16 memos) and passed on what he discovered so far to a reporter from
mom Jones magazine.
[29]
In a court filing in April 2017, Steele revealed previously unreported information that in December 2016, shortly after the presidential election, he gave a copy of the 16 memos to "the senior British national security official and sent an encrypted version to Fusion GPS with instructions to deliver a hard copy to Senator
John McCain (R-AZ).
[25] McCain, who had been informed about the alleged links between Kremlin and Trump, met with former British ambassador to Moscow
Sir Andrew Wood. Wood confirmed the existence of the dossier and vouched for Steele's "professionalism and integrity".
[30] McCain obtained the dossier from
David J. Kramer and took it directly to FBI director
James Comey on December 9, 2016.
[2][20] Comey has confirmed that counter-intelligence investigations are under way into possible links between Trump associates and Moscow, and CNN has reported that the FBI used the dossier to bolster its investigations."
[25]
After delivering the 16 memos, more information was received, and two more pages, the "December memo", dated "13 December 2016", was prepared. It alleged efforts by Trump's personal attorney,
Michael Cohen, to pay those who had 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak|hacked the DNC and to "cover up all traces of the hacking operation".
[32][25] Trump and Cohen have denied the allegations.
[32][25][33] Cohen said that between August 23 and August 29 he was in
Los Angeles and in New York for the entire month of September.
[34] According to a Czech intelligence source, there is no record of him entering Prague by plane, but
Respekt magazine pointed out that it's theoretically possible he could have entered by car or train from a neighboring country in the
Schengen Zone.
[35]
Hints of existence
By the third quarter of 2016, many news organizations knew about the existence of the dossier, which had been described as an "open secret" among journalists. However, they chose not to publish information that could not be confirmed.
[2] Finally on October 31, 2016, a week before the election,
mom 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.
[29] It starts with the allegation that:
The "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance". It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals". It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him".
—
mom Jones, October 31, 2016
[29]
In October 2016, the FBI reached an agreement with Steele to pay him to continue his work, according to involved sources reported by
The Washington Post. "Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for
British intelligence."
[36] The FBI found Steele credible and his unproved information worthy enough that it considered paying Steele to continue collecting information, but the release of the document to the public stopped discussions between Steele and the FBI.
[36]
President-Elect Trump and President
Barack Obama were briefed on the existence of the dossier by the chiefs of several U.S. intelligence agencies in early January 2017. Vice President
Joe Biden has confirmed that he and the president had received briefings on the dossier, and the allegations within.
[37][22][38][39]
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 stated that it would not publish specific details on the memos because it had not "independently corroborated the specific allegations".
[40][41] Following the CNN report,
[42] BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier that it said was the basis of the briefing, including unverified claims that Russian operatives had collected "embarrassing material" involving Trump that could be used to
blackmail him.
[43][44][41][45]
Many news organizations knew about the document in the fall of 2016, before the presidential election, but did not publish it because they could not independently verify the information.
[46] BuzzFeed was harshly criticized for publishing what
Washington Post columnist
Margaret Sullivan called "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump",
[47] while
The New York Times noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources.
[48] 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.
[5]
Authorship
When
CNN reported the existence of the dossier on January 10, 2017,
[49] 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 realized it was "only a matter of time until his name became public knowledge", and, accompanied by his family, he fled into hiding in fear of "a prompt and potentially dangerous backlash against him from Moscow".
[50][51][19] The Wall Street Journal revealed Steele's name the next day, on January 11.
[52] Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, for whom Steele worked at the time the dossier was authored, and its director Christopher Burrows would not "confirm or deny" that Orbis had produced the dossier.
[49][2]
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 and is currently working for Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, a private intelligence company Steele co-founded in London.
[53][52][54] Steele entered MI6 in 1987, directly after his graduation from
Cambridge University.
[55]
Former British ambassador to Moscow
Sir Andrew Wood has vouched for Steele's reputation.
[30] He views Steele as a "very competent professional operator ... I take the report seriously. I don't think it's totally implausible." He also stated that "the report's key allegation—that Trump and Russia's leadership were communicating via secret back channels during the presidential campaign—was eminently plausible".
[56]
On December 26, 2016,
Oleg Erovinkin, a former
KGB/
FSB general, was found dead in his car in Moscow. Erovinkin was a key liaison between
Igor Sechin, head of state-owned oil company
Rosneft, and President Putin. Steele claimed much of the information came from a source close to Sechin. According to Christo Grozev, a journalist at Risk Management Lab, a think-tank based in Bulgaria, the circumstances of Erovinkin's death were "mysterious". Grozev suspected Erovinkin helped Steele compile the dossier on Trump and suggests the hypothesis that the death may have been part of a cover-up by the Russian government.
[57][58] Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, who specializes in Russian history and security, rejected Grozev's hypothesis.
[59][57] In interviews with
Luke Harding, "Steele was adamant that Erovinkin wasn't his source and 'not one of ours.' As a person close to Steele put it to me: 'Sometimes people just die.'"
[60]
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."
[61]
Veracity
Observers and experts have had varying reactions to the dossier. Generally, "former intelligence officers and other national-security experts" urged "skepticism and caution" but still took "the fact that the nation's top intelligence officials chose to present a summary version of the dossier to both President Obama and President-elect Trump" as an indication "that they may have had a relatively high degree of confidence that at least some of the claims therein were credible, or at least worth investigating further".
[62] The author of the dossier said he believes that 70–90% of the document is accurate.
[63] Steele said that his FBI contacts greeted his intelligence report with "shock and horror".
[63] In his June 2017 congressional testimony, former FBI director
James Comey called "some personally sensitive aspects" of the dossier "salacious and unverified," but he did not state that the entire dossier was unverified or that the salacious aspects were false. When Senator Richard Burr asked if any of the allegations in the dossier had been confirmed, Comey said he could not answer that question in a public setting.
[64][10]
Vice President Biden told reporters that while he and President Obama were receiving a briefing on the extent of Russian hackers trying to influence the US election, there was a two-page addendum which addressed the contents of the Steele dossier.
[65] Top intelligence officials told them they "felt obligated to inform them about uncorroborated allegations about President-elect Donald Trump out of concern the information would become public and catch them off-guard".
[66]
Former
Los Angeles Times Moscow correspondent Robert Gillette wrote in an op-ed in the
Concord Monitor that the dossier has had at least one of its main factual assertions verified. On January 6, 2017, the
Director of National Intelligence released a report assessing "with high confidence" that Russia's combined cyber and propaganda operation was directed personally by
Vladimir Putin, with the aim of harming Hillary Clinton's candidacy and helping Trump.
[67] Gillette wrote: "Steele's dossier, paraphrasing multiple sources, reported precisely the same conclusion, in greater detail, six months earlier, in a memo dated June 20."
[68]
Newsweek published a list of "13 things that don't add up" in the dossier, writing that the document was a "strange mix of the amateur and the insightful" and stating that the document "contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip that could indeed be, as the author claims, from deep insiders—or equally gleaned" from Russian newspapers and blogs.
[69] Former UK ambassador to Russia Sir
Tony Brenton stated that certain aspects of the dossier were inconsistent with British intelligence's understanding of how the Kremlin works, commenting: "I've seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in [the dossier] which look pretty shaky."
[70]
According to
Business Insider, the dossier alleges that "the Trump campaign agreed to minimize US opposition to Russia's incursions into Ukraine".
[17] In July 2016, the
Republican National Convention made changes to the Republican Party's platform on Ukraine: initially they proposed providing "lethal weapons" to Ukraine, but the line was changed to "appropriate assistance".
J. D. Gordon, who was one of Trump's national security advisers during the campaign, said that he had advocated for changing language because that reflected what Trump had said.
[17][71]
Reputation in the U.S. intelligence community
According to
Paul Wood of
BBC News, the information in Steele's report is also reported by "multiple intelligence sources" and "at least one East European intelligence service". They report that “compromising material on Mr. Trump” included "more than one tape, not just video, but audio as well, on more than one date, in more than one place, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.” While also mentioning that "nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it",
[72][52] he added that "the CIA believes it is credible that the
Kremlin has such
kompromat—or compromising material—on the next US commander in chief" and "a joint taskforce, which includes the CIA and the FBI, has been investigating allegations that the Russians may have sent money to Mr Trump's organisation or his election campaign".
[73][74][72] On March 30, 2017, Wood reported that the FBI was using the dossier as a roadmap for its investigation.
[75] On April 18, 2017, CNN reported that, according to U.S. officials, information from the dossier had been used as part of the basis for getting the
FISA warrant to monitor former Trump foreign policy adviser
Carter Page during the summer of 2016. Officials told CNN this information would have had to be independently corroborated by the FBI before being used to obtain the warrant.
[16]
Susan Hennessey, a former
National Security Agency lawyer now with the
Brookings Institution, stated: "My general take is that the intelligence community and law enforcement seem to be taking these claims seriously. That itself is highly significant. But it is not the same as these allegations being verified. Even if this was an intelligence community document—which it isn't—this kind of raw intelligence is still treated with skepticism."
[62][76] Hennessey and
Benjamin Wittes wrote that "the current state of the evidence makes a powerful argument for a serious public inquiry into this matter".
[76] Robert S. Litt, a former lawyer for the
Director of National Intelligence, wrote that the dossier "played absolutely no role" in the intelligence community's determination that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
[77]
On February 10, 2017, CNN reported that some communications between "senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals" described in the dossier had been corroborated by multiple U.S. officials. They "took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier". Sources told CNN that some conversations had been "intercepted during routine intelligence gathering", but refused to reveal the content of conversations, or specify which communications were detailed in the dossier. CNN was unable to confirm whether conversations were related to Trump. U.S. officials said the corroboration gave "US intelligence and law enforcement 'greater confidence' in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents".
[11]
British journalist
Julian Borger wrote in October 2017 that "Steele’s reports are being taken seriously after lengthy scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators", at least Steele's assessment that Russia had conducted a campaign to interfere in the 2016 election to Clinton's detriment; that part of the Steele dossier "has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it".
[78] Liberal commentator
Jonathan Chait wrote in December 2017 about the dossier that mainstream media "treat it as gossip" whereas the intelligence community "take it seriously".
[79]
Senator
Sheldon Whitehouse (
D-
Rhode Island), member of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, has stated: "As I understand it, a good deal of his information remains unproven, but none of it has been disproven, and considerable amounts of it have been proven."
[80]
Carter Page testimony
On November 2, 2017, Carter Page, Donald Trump's foreign policy adviser during the campaign, testified before the
House Intelligence Committee which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Page testified he informed
Jeff Sessions,
J. D. Gordon,
Hope Hicks and
Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, of a planned trip to Russia and that Lewandowski approved the trip, responding "If you'd like to go on your own, not affiliated with the campaign, you know, that's fine."
[81][82] In his testimony, Page admitted he met with high ranking Kremlin officials. Previously, Page had denied meeting any Russian officials during the trip. His comments appeared to corroborate portions of the dossier.
[83][84]
Use in 2017 Special Counsel investigation
Main article:
Special Counsel investigation (2017–present)
According to
Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman
Mark Warner (D-VA), the dossier's allegations are being investigated by a
Special Counsel led by
Robert Mueller, which is also investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
[85] In the summer of 2017, Mueller's team of investigators met with Christopher Steele.
[86] As some leads stemming from the dossier have already been followed and confirmed by the
FBI, legal experts have stated that Special Counsel investigators, headed by Robert Mueller, are obligated to follow any leads the dossier has presented them with, irrespective of what parties financed it in its various stages of development, or "[t]hey would be derelict in their duty if they didn't."
[85][87]
While Trump and some Republicans have claimed that the dossier was behind the beginning of the investigation into the Trump campaign's potential conspiracy with Russia, in December 2017, former and current intelligence officials revealed that the actual impetus was a series of comments made in May 2016 by Trump campaign foreign policy advisor
George Papadopoulos during a night of "heavy drinking at an upscale London bar" made to a top Australian diplomat in Britain. Papadopoulos revealed that he had inside information by bragging that the Kremlin had "thousands of emails" stolen from Hillary Clinton which could be used to damage her campaign. He had learned this about three weeks earlier. Two months later, when WikiLeaks started releasing DNC emails, Australian officials alerted the Americans about Papadopoulos' remarks.
[88][89]
Other soon-discovered factors then played into the FBI's decision to investigate Russian interference and any role played by the Trump campaign: intelligence from friendly governments, especially the British and Dutch, and then the information about a trip to Moscow by Trump adviser Carter Page. Steele's first report was sent to Fusion GPS, dated June 20, 2016, and FBI agents first interviewed Steele in October 2016.
[89] A year later, in October 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and became a cooperating witness in Mueller's investigation.
[88]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Russia_dossier
Cristina Maza,Newsweek
