Newly released material raises the possibility that Russian disinformation made its way into a dossier of opposition research that the FBI relied on when applying for warrants to eavesdrop on a former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump.
That wiretap led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into the debunked conspiracy theory that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
The new evidence points out that Russian election meddling started on the Democrats side with the Steele dossier — and the FBI knew about it.
The new material, contained in footnotes to a Justice Department watchdog report that was recently declassified by the Trump administration, indicates the FBI was advised even as it sought the warrants that some of the information included in the debunked Steele dossier was not accurate — and was potentially influenced by Russian disinformation.
It may add to accusations that the FBI did not take seriously the dossier’s reliability as it investigated the Trump campaign. A Justice Department inspector general report from December that included the blacked-out footnotes faulted the FBI for failing to reassess the credibility of the dossier after receiving information that called into question some of its reporting.
The FBI relied in part on the document when it applied for a wiretap of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The fact that the dossier was used at all is one of the main points of contention Trump supporters cite in challenging the legitimacy of the probe.
The FBI also cited media reports referencing the Steele dossier when applying for their warrants, and agents intentionally withheld exonerating information on Page and the Trump campaign in almost every one of their applications.
The footnotes were released by two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who said in a joint statement that the information makes clear that the FBI’s justification in targeting Page “was riddled with significant flaws.”
On Thursday, the senators asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide all intelligence records received and reviewed by the FBI team that conducted the Russia investigation.
“These recently declassified footnotes raise another issue of significant concern: what other parts of the FBI’s investigation were infected by Russian disinformation?” they wrote.
One of the footnotes says the FBI was alerted in 2017 that a particular allegation included in the dossier was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”
It also cites a February 2017 U.S. intelligence report saying that an individual with reported ties to Trump and Russia had cautioned that certain allegations related to Trump’s behavior during a trip to Moscow four years earlier were false and the product of Russian intelligence “infiltrate(ing) a source into the network.”
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday.
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The dossier of information was compiled during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign by Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose research was financed by Democrats.
The FBI relied in part on information from the dossier during multiple applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2016 and 2017 to monitor the communications of Page on suspicion that he was an agent of a foreign power. Page has denied any wrongdoing.
The inspector general report said the FBI had contemplated the possibility “that Russia was funneling disinformation to Steele, and the possibility that disinformation was included in his election reports.”
One footnote says a January 2017 report identified an inaccuracy in the dossier’s reporting on Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer. It does not detail the inaccuracy, but it could be a reference to a claim in the document that Cohen met with Kremlin representatives in Prague in the summer of 2016. Cohen has long denied that.
The footnotes also say a June 2017 intelligence report indicated that two people affiliated with Russian intelligence “were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.”
That assertion raises the prospect that Steele’s reporting could have been influenced by disinformation from the Kremlin.
“The Supervisory Intel Analyst told us he was aware of these reports, but that he had no information as of June 2017 that Steele’s election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised,” the footnote states.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article