Fact Checker: What the Steele dossier said vs. what the Mueller report said
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who compiled a dossier on Donald Trump.
The FBI’s counterintelligence operation into whether Russia was assisting the Trump campaign was not prompted by the dossier. But the FBI was aware of the document and used Steele as a source. The FBI even obtained a secret court order to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page after convincing a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe he was acting as an agent of a foreign power, Russia.
Neither case is confirmed by the Mueller report. Mueller was looking for criminal acts, not seeking to confirm the dossier. In fact, Steele is rarely mentioned in the more than 400 pages. So one cannot necessarily say the Mueller report ends the matter, given a continuing counterintelligence investigation. But some key elements certainly appear in doubt.
Talks on the project continued even as Trump pursued the presidency — and Trump aide Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to misleading Congress about those efforts. But a case could also be made that the memo’s political analysis about Russia’s motivations might have been made by any close reader of the newspapers. By the time this memo was written, The Washington Post had already broken the news that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee.
“Further evidence of extensive conspiracy between campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in the US. Agreed exchange of information established in both directions.” This memo makes the strongest suggestion of coordination and collusion — a “conspiracy” — between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
“TRUMP associate admits Kremlin behind recent appearance of DNC e-mails on WikiLeaks, as means of maintaining plausible deniability.” This is correct. Mueller concluded that Russia distributed hacked material through WikiLeaks, as well as fictitious online personas “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0.” The report noted: “The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.
“Page said that, during his time in Moscow, he met with friends and associates he knew from when he lived in Russia, including Andrey Baranov, a former Gazprom employee who had become the head of investor relations at Rosneft, a Russian energy company,” the Mueller report said. “Page stated that he and Baranov talked about ‘immaterial non-public’ information.
“Two knowledgeable St Petersburg sources claim Republican candidate TRUMP has paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities there but key witnesses silenced and evidence hard to obtain.” The Mueller report does not describe any bribes paid by Trump. There is no indication Mueller investigated this allegation.
“Kremlin insider reports TRUMP lawyer COHEN’s secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials in August 2016 was/were held in Prague.” The Mueller report suggests no such meeting in Prague took place, even though three of the Steele memos discuss this alleged meeting in detail.
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