A lawyer representing the DNC and Clinton campaign provided Christopher Steele with information in 2016 regarding an alleged secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, the former spy told a British court last month.
That now-debunked tip, from Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann, set off a chain of events that led to Steele publishing a Sept. 14, 2016 memo accusing the founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, of having “illicit” ties to Vladimir Putin, according to a court transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A week after Steele wrote that memo, he had another meeting with Sussmann’s colleague, Marc Elias, according to the transcript.
Steele disclosed the previously unreported meetings with Sussmann and Elias during testimony in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the Alfa Bank founders, the transcript shows.
Steele’s testimony about Sussmann and Elias provides insight into how deeply involved the two lawyers were in the Trump investigation, and suggests they helped shape Steele’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Elias, who served as general counsel for the Clinton campaign, hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to investigate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS in turn picked Steele, a former MI6 officer, in June 2016 to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Russia.
Steele would go on to produce 17 memos alleging that the Russian government had blackmail material on Trump, and that members of his campaign were conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.
Many of Steele’s most explosive allegations have been debunked in the 40 months since BuzzFeed News published the dossier.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report said that Steele’s primary source of information disputed many of the allegations in the dossier. The IG report also said that the FBI and U.S. intelligence community received evidence in 2017 that Russian intelligence operatives may have fed disinformation to Steele.
It said the FBI investigated whether there were “cyber links” between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization, the company owned by Donald Trump, “but had concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links.”
https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/09/doj-watchdog-debunk-dossier/
A Justice Department watchdog’s report released Monday definitively debunked one of the Steele dossier’s most pervasive allegations of collusion, while severely undermining other hair-raising claims about Donald Trump and former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The report is unsparing of both Christopher Steele, the dossier author, and the FBI’s handling of the salacious document.
The dossier’s most specific allegation of Trump-Russia collusion — that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to pay off Russian hackers — was “not true,” FBI officials determined, according to the IG report.
The source told the FBI in interviews in early 2017 that the dossier’s steamiest allegation — that the Kremlin had blackmail video of Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes — was based on “rumor and speculation.”
Steele said in the dossier that his source had confirmed the incident, which allegedly occurred in 2013 at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. But according to the IG report, Steele’s source told the FBI that they had been unable to confirm that the incident occurred.
