Trump swiftly
rejected Steele's claims and said a "group of opponents ... put that crap together." Nearly five years later, it's clearer than ever that he wasn't too far off about the origins of the dossier.
Two special counsel investigations, multiple congressional inquiries, civil lawsuits in the US and the United Kingdom, and an internal Justice Department review have now fully unspooled the behind-the-scenes role that some Democrats played in this saga. They paid for the research, funneled information to Steele's sources, and then urged the FBI to investigate Trump's connections to Russia.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/russia-investigation-what-to-know/index.html
Mother Jones first revealed the existence of the dossier a few days before the 2016 election, and said the memos were part of an "opposition research project" underwritten by Democrats. Nearly a year passed before the full truth came out about the financing:
The money flowed from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to law firm Perkins Coie, to the
research company Fusion GPS, and then ultimately to Steele,
who got $168,000.
(Anti-Trump Republicans
initially funded Fusion GPS' research during the 2016 GOP primaries, but the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee picked up the tab before Steele got involved.)
But Democratic involvement in Steele's work was much deeper than previously known. Court filings from the Durham inquiry recently revealed that some information in the dossier originated from Charles Dolan, 71, a public relations executive with expertise in Russian affairs who had a decades-long political relationship with the Clinton family. He has not been accused of any crimes.
Federal prosecutors said Dolan was in regular contact in 2016 with Steele's primary source Igor Danchenko, 49, a Russian citizen and foreign policy analyst who lives in Virginia.
Danchenko was indicted on November 4 for allegedly lying to the FBI about his dealings with Dolan and a fellow Soviet-born expat that he claimed was one of his sources.
Danchenko
pleaded not guilty last week. In a statement to CNN, his defense attorney Mark Schamel said Durham is pushing a "false narrative designed to humiliate and slander a renowned expert in business intelligence for political gain." Schamel also accused Durham of including legally unnecessary information in the 39-page indictment to smear Danchenko.
"For the past five years, those with an agenda have sought to expose Mr. Danchenko's identity and tarnish his reputation while undermining U.S. National Security," Schamel said. "...This latest injustice will not stand. We will expose how Mr. Danchenko has been unfairly maligned by these false allegations."
The indictment indirectly connected Dolan to the infamous claim that Russia possessed a compromising tape of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow, which
became known as the "pee tape." (Trump and Russia both
denied the allegations.) According to the Danchenko indictment, in June 2016, Dolan toured the Ritz-Carlton suite where the alleged liaison occurred, and discussed
Trump's 2013 visit with hotel staff, but wasn't told about any sexual escapades. It's still unclear where those salacious details that ended up in the dossier came from.
Dolan was also indirectly linked in the indictment to still-unverified claims about Russian officials who were allegedly part of the election meddling. The indictment also suggested that Steele's memos exaggerated what Dolan had passed along to Danchenko.
The indictment also says the dossier contained a relatively mundane item about Trump campaign infighting that Dolan later told the FBI he actually gleaned from news articles. Prosecutors say Dolan even lied to Danchenko about where he got the gossip, by attributing it to a "GOP friend" who was "a close associate of Trump."
An attorney representing Dolan, Ralph Martin, declined to comment for this story because his client "is a witness in an ongoing case."
Durham explicitly stated in the Danchenko indictment that the Clinton campaign didn't direct, and wasn't aware of, Dolan's activities regarding the dossier. Clinton has said she only
learned about the dossier when it was posted online, two months after the 2016 election. Senior Clinton campaign aides
also said they
found out about Steele's work from press reports.
Clinton's allies prod the FBI
The Danchenko indictment raises new concerns about the circular nature of portions of Steele's work, and how it fit into a larger effort by Democrats to dirty up Trump. Clinton's campaign funded the project, and we now know that much of the material in Steele's memos ended up being mere political gossip. Steele then sent his explosive but unverified findings to the FBI and
State Department.
While Steele was passing his tips onto the FBI in fall 2016, a Clinton campaign lawyer separately
met with a senior FBI official and gave him information about
strange cyberactivity between servers at the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia.
The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, has since been charged with lying to the FBI during that meeting, for allegedly saying he wasn't providing the dirt on behalf of any client, even though he ultimately billed that time to the Clinton campaign, and also billed them for other work he did on the server issue. Durham says Sussmann repeated this lie during a meeting with CIA officials in February 2017, where he told them about the server theory. Sussmann has
pleaded not guilty.
The indictment says Sussman peddled the same material to a Slate reporter, who
published a story right before the election. The story said reputable computer scientists
uncovered unusual activity between servers belonging to the Trump Organization and the Moscow-based Alfa Bank, suggesting a secret backchannel.
The Trump Organization and Alfa Bank both
denied there was a backchannel. The FBI investigated the underlying data and ruled out any improper cyber links by February 2017.
But after the Slate article came out, Clinton's campaign
went on a
PR blitz, tying Trump to Russia. Clinton had already
slammed Trump for months, for
embracing Russia's
interference in the election, which included releasing hacked emails from
Clinton's campaign chairman and the
Democratic National Committee.
Sussmann was a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, which indirectly hired Steele. Both men separately went to the FBI in 2016 with dirt about Trump, though there's no indication Sussmann knew about the dossier. (A 2019 Justice Department
watchdog report pointed out that the FBI routinely accepts information from biased or dubious sources, and then investigators try to independently vet the material.)