You do not have to wade far into the recently declassified Crossfire Hurricane documents to be shocked. I had only read three pages of the FBI’s December 19, 2016 interview with the DoJ’s Bruce Ohr before learning just how early in the game the FBI brass knew that the Steele dossier was worthless.
In the way of background, on July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” FBI agent Peter Strzok was assigned to head it up.
If the goal was to cripple Trump regardless of the evidence, Strzok was the man for the job. “Damn this feels momentous,” he texted his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, upon getting the assignment. Two weeks later he explained to Page his motives. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted her. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Ohr played a curious role in the whole affair. He served as unofficial DoJ contact with the notorious Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous Steele dossier. According to Ohr, the two met for breakfast on the same day the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane. Steele wanted to discuss some “serious stuff” involving low-level Trump adviser Carter Page.
More interesting than what Steele claimed to know about Page is what Ohr already knew about the funding of the Steele dossier. As Ohr told his FBI interviewer, Joe Pientka, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS “hired Steele to dig up Trump’s connection to Russia.” Complicating matters is that Ohr’s wife Nelli worked for Simpson.
Protecting Nellie, a Russian interpreter, Ohr claimed she was “hired to conduct open source research.” He conceded, however, “Even though she did not know the goal of the project, she was able to surmise the purpose as the individuals were close to Trump.”
Ohr knew, too, that “Glenn Simpson was hired by a lawyer who does opposition research,” although he did not name the lawyer.
Steele, reported Ohr, “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.” Ohr did not believe that Steele was “making up information.” That said, he had little confidence in Steele’s sources. Steele may have reported what he heard, but, said Ohr, “that doesn’t make that story true.” Explained Ohr, “There are always Russian conspiracy theories that come from the Kremlin.”
Steele and Ohr met again that September, close to the time reporter Michael Isikoff first broke the story of the Steele dossier. In this meeting, an increasingly worried Steele fed Ohr what would prove to be bogus information about Trump’s relationship to Alfa Bank. On September 23, 2016, Isikoff wrote a lengthy breakout article for Yahoo News based on a briefing by “multiple sources.” Ohr was unsure whether Isikoff had met with Simpson or Steele or both.
As Isikoff reported, intelligence officials were investigating Carter Page’s “private communications with senior Russian officials.” He reported, too, that Senate majority leader Harry Reid had briefed the FBI director James Comey on the “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Reid likely got this information from the Clinton campaign, apparently unaware that Comey had access to the same spurious intel.
In October 2016, a few weeks after the article’s publication, the DOJ and the FBI packaged the Isikoff article and the dossier in their application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), specifically to monitor Carter Page. As the 2019 inspector general report by Michael Horowitz made painfully clear, despite years of denial by various parties, the FBI relied heavily upon the Steele dossier to get FISA authorization on Page. Serving on the FISC at the time was Judge James Boasberg. Anti-Trump partisans tainted every step of the process.
At this time, if FBI director James Comey knew no more than Bruce Ohr did, he knew that the Hillary Clinton campaign, working through the Perkins Coie law firm, commissioned Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. In turn, Fusion, assisted by Ohr’s wife Nelli, “hired Steele to dig up Trump’s connection to Russia.” This information was then fed back to Clinton.
Comey also knew that Steele was as desperate as his own Peter Strzok to keep Trump out of the White House. He knew, too, that Steele’s information was no more reliable than the other “Russian conspiracy theories that come from the Kremlin.” Even more appalling, Comey submitted the Isikoff article as independent evidence, full well knowing that it was simply reheated Steele material.
The Crossfire Hurricane documents also include a June 15, 2017 FBI interview with Adm. Mike Rogers, Obama’s director of the National Security Agency. This interview illuminates the fate of the Steele dossier post-election.
As Rogers related, President Barack Obama requested from his national security team a “single intelligence product on the topic of Russian interference in the 2016 election.” Obama’s inner circle — FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and National Intelligence director James Clapper — never fully trusted Rogers and withheld information as needed.
In late December 2016, for instance, when Rogers reviewed the content of that intelligence product that would come to be known as the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), he was unaware that the Obama intel team was tying Trump associate Carter Page into the alleged Russian interference. He would not learn this news until March 2017.
Rogers was also surprised to see “the contents of the ‘Steele dossier’ in the body of the product.” In an early January 2017 meeting, Rogers asked his three colleagues “why the ICA needed to focus on the dossier, as it was considered largely uncorroborated.” Rogers succeeded over Comey’s objection in getting the dossier moved to the appendix.
On January 5, the four members of the National Security team met with Trump to share the details of the ICA. As agreed among the four, Comey would stay behind to brief President-Elect Trump “about the contents of the Steele dossier.” The Rogers interview adds no new information as to what happened following that meeting, but much is now known.
At the time of the January 5 meeting, as Comey knew, CNN had the story. He also knew that by telling the president about the dossier, he would give CNN the necessary news hook to report the dossier’s allegations, at least the more plausible ones.
As planned, an account of Comey’s one-on-one with Trump was promptly leaked to CNN. On January 8, deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe emailed his senior FBI colleagues, “CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story. The trigger for [CNN] is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment.” McCabe sent this email under the heading, “The flood is coming.”
On January 10, 2017, a quartet of CNN reporters including Jake Tapper broke the story of the Steele dossier. In the first paragraph, readers learned that “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” In the second, they learned that “the allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible.”
Unfortunately for CNN, hours later on that same January day, BuzzFeed served up the ultimate buzzkill. It went ahead and ran the complete dossier under the headline “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia.” The CNN crew was outraged. “Collegiality wise,” wrote Jake Tapper to BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith, “it was you stepping on my dick.” CNN had an exclusive. Steele himself had briefed its reporters. They could have milked the story for weeks. BuzzFeed blew their cover.
No one stepped on anyone’s dick to break the story of the dossier’s funding. Incredibly, it was not until October 2017 that the story broke, and only then through the relentless probing of Rep. Devin Nunes, Kash Patel, and their team of investigators.
Knowing that Nunes had uncovered the Clinton funding source, Obama’s people fed the story to the Washington Post. Too bad they did not share the truth a year earlier. They could have spared the president and the nation a world of trouble.
Image: J via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
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