On Friday, the Department of Justice released newly declassified information from an inspector general report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, revealing for the first time that the FBI had received information indicating the Christopher Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation. The newly unredacted portions of the IG’s report also confirmed there was no “network of sources” backing up Steele’s reporting.
These facts establish the FBI used Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election as a pretext to investigate Donald Trump and the special counsel’s office was complicit in this ploy.
As can be seen from a comparison of the footnotes, the original redaction created the impression that the details hidden in footnote 350 concerned Steele’s connection to various Russian oligarchs. But the declassification now reveals that the focus was on Russian disinformation.
Russian Disinformation Influenced FISA Warrant Basis
Specifically, the IG discovered that the Crossfire Hurricane team had received reporting “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting.” And in 2017, the Crossfire Hurricane team received a report highlighting Steele’s inaccurate reporting concerning activities of Michael Cohen.
The Crossfire Hurricane team was told that portion of Steele’s reporting was assessed to be “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.” A follow-up report, also from 2017, asserted that “public reporting about the details of Trump’s [redacted] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltrat[ing] a source into the network’ of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”
Yet they continued to use the dossier as a basis to investigate the Trump campaign and failed to disclose those details to the FISA court.
The Inspector General Lied to Americans
Then, in 2017, after Americans had elected Trump president, the investigation continued, even though the Crossfire Hurricane team received multiple additional reports that Russia was engaged in a disinformation campaign. The IG report, however, hid those facts from the country, and instead portrayed the possibility of disinformation as merely a general risk—not one based on evidence and facts.
“We found that the FBI was aware of the potential for disinformation in the Steele election reporting and, in part to address that issue, made some effort to assess that possibility,” Horowitz’s report read. Horowitz added that “Steele told us that Russian intelligence is ‘sophisticated’ and relies on disinformation. He said it can involve ‘planted information,’ which he described as ‘controlled information,’ and that often the information is true but with ‘bits missing and changed.’” The IG then concluded that, “Steele told us that he had no evidence that his reporting was ‘polluted’ with Russian disinformation.”
But the declassified details show it was much more than a “potential for disinformation” of which the FBI was aware—it had received multiple reports that Steele’s reporting included Russia disinformation. The IG report obscured that reality, and in fact conveyed the impression that Russia disinformation was not in play, which is exactly why Grassley and Johnson sought declassification of the footnotes.
But now we know that not only did the government misrepresent Steele’s “source network,” it misrepresented the existence of a primary sub-source “source network.”
This revelation has a second and broader implication than further evidence of FISA abuse: The complete lack of a “source network” undermines the entire basis for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the special counsel probe.
While team members and supervisors knew early that there was no source network, that Russian disinformation was potentially in play, and that there was no Russia collusion, rather than drop the investigation into candidate, and then president, Trump, they continued for more than two years to undermine the Trump administration. And as Friday’s declassification shows, the depth of the deception and the plot to take down the duly elected president is still not fully known.
