Christopher Steele isn’t getting off the hook so easily.
According a memo released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, Steele, the former British MI6 agent who compiled the Trump dossier commissioned by Fusion GPS, was fed allegations from Clinton associates during his research on President Trump, Fox News reports.
The Monday memo is an unclassified, redacted version of a criminal referral filed on Jan. 4 by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that suggests Steele lied to the FBI about his contacts or that the FBI misrepresented Steele’s statements.
Grassley and Graham wrote to the Justice Department in January, requesting an investigation of Steele. The Senators now ask the FBI for an emergency review of their criminal referral so that it can be made public with limited redactions.
In the memo, the lawmakers state “there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.”
One portion of the heavily-redacted memo claimed that Steele received information from “a foreign sub-source who ‘is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).”
“It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,” Grassley and Graham wrote to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in January.
The Grassley-Graham memo says that Steele used the information from the “foreign sub-source” to write an additional document related to President Trump’s ties to Russia that was not included in the infamous dossier published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, the Washington Post reports.
According to the memo, Clinton associate Cody Shearer was in contact with Steele about anti-Trump research. Jonathan Winer, an Obama State Department official, was a connection between Steele and the State Department during the 2016 election.
A House Intelligence Committee memo declassified on Friday revealed that the largely unverified Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie, was used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump associate Carter Page.
Friday’s memo showed that the FBI was aware of the dossier’s origins but did not disclose that information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when applying for a FISA warrant.
The FBI opposed the release of the Grassley-Graham referral, saying the Bureau “respects” the committee’s desire for transparency but that it “cannot and will not weaken its commitment” to protecting classified information.
Sens. Grassley and Graham said the FBI’s remarks “mischaracterize and misstate” the amount of classified information in the document, and have asked the Bureau and Justice Department to “immediately review the classified referral in light of [Friday’s] declassification and provide the Committee with the declassified version by no later than February 6, 2018.”
Despite Democrats’ best efforts, the Clintons’ full role in the Russia-Trump investigation is coming to light.
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