Steele testified in a British court that Sussmann provided him with other claims about Alfa Bank’s purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a late July 2016 meeting. These allegations made their way into a mid-September 2016 memo that became part of Steele’s dossier, although Steele repeatedly misspells “Alfa” as “Alpha.” Shortly after writing that memo, Steele met with Elias.
The grand jury indictment against former Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann centers on a September 2016 meeting between him and then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in which Sussmann passed along allegations claiming there was a secret backchannel between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.
After those emails were made public Thursday evening, Freundlich, in an unusual tweet , said, “I think it’s clear based on this story that we did in fact ... kill the story.”
Although special counsel John Durham alleged Sussmann told Baker he was not working for any specific client, the special counsel contends Sussmann was secretly doing the bidding of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign while billing her team for it and working on behalf of technology executive Rodney Joffe. Sussmann pleaded not guilty .
Elias testified that he was aware of Fusion's plans to have Steele brief reporters about his anti-Trump research during the 2016 contest. Elias met with Steele during the 2016 contest and periodically briefed the campaign about Fusion GPS's findings.
The Durham indictment said Sussmann, Joffe, and Elias “coordinated and communicated about the Russian Bank-1 allegations during telephone calls and meetings, which Sussmann billed to the Clinton Campaign” from late July through mid-August 2016.
Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School, criticized McAuliffe for paying Elias and raised suspicions that the Democratic attorney might be preparing to challenge the results of the race against Republican Glenn Youngkin.
In January 2017, the primary sub-source, later identified as Russian-trained Ukrainian attorney Igor Danchenko, was interviewed for three days by the FBI, and he said that Steele misstated or exaggerated certain information.
On January 11, 2017, Paul Wood, of BBC News, wrote that the salacious information in Steele's dossier was also reported by "multiple intelligence sources" and "at least one East European intelligence service".
One of the findings of the 2019 Inspector General's report related to conflicting accounts of sourced content in the dossier. When Steele's Primary Sub-source was later interviewed by the FBI about the allegations sourced to them, he gave accounts which conflicted with Steele's renderings in the dossier and implied that Steele "misstated or exaggerated" their statements. FBI agent Peter Strzok wrote that "Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his subsource network."
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a political opposition research report written from June to December 2016 containing allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and co-operation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during ...
Steele delivered his reports individually to Fusion GPS as one- to three-page numbered reports. The first report, dated June 20, 2016, was sent to Washington by courier and hand-delivered to Fusion GPS.
Steele, the author of the dossier, said he believes that 70–90% of the dossier is accurate, although he gives the "golden showers" allegation a 50% chance of being true. In testimony to Congress, Simpson quoted "Steele as saying that any intelligence, especially from Russia, is bound to carry intentional disinformation, but that Steele believes his dossier is 'largely not disinformation'." Steele has countered the suggestion that the Russians deliberately fed his sources misinformation that would undermine Trump: "The ultimate Russian goal was to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally spread embarrassing information about Trump—true or not—is not logical."
The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day", but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information". The subsequent public release of the dossier stopped discussions between Steele and the FBI.
A conservative nonprofit has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Hillary Clinton campaign of violating election laws when it paid British citizen Christopher Steele to gather Kremlin-provided political dirt on candidate Donald Trump.
Coolidge Reagan is the second nonprofit to file an FEC dossier complaint.
The suit’s purpose is to persuade a federal judge to order the FEC to vote on whether to open a formal investigation. Coolidge Reagan filed an FEC complaint in August. It was accepted for review, but there has been no formal commission action, according to Dan Backer, the foundation’s founder and president.
Mr. Backer said the old association would not prevent her from acting since the law firm wouldn’t have been handling the Steele dossier issue 17 years ago.