Chuck Ross, DCNF
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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The Senate Intelligence Committee said that the special counsel’s office refused to provide information regarding the Steele dossier, and that the author of the salacious document “repeatedly” refused requests for an interview.
- In a long-awaited report released on Tuesday, the Senate panel affirmed previous findings that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It also blasted the FBI’s handling of information from Christopher Steele.
- The report says that the FBI gave “unjustified credence” to information from Steele.
The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a long-awaited report released Tuesday that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016, affirming the findings of other investigations into a possible Trump-Kremlin conspiracy.
The report, which clocks in at 966 pages, also offered a scathing assessment of the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier, which was a key document in the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
“The FBI gave the Steele Dossier unjustified credence, based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record,” the report says.
“The Committee found that, within the FBI, the dossier was given a veneer of credibility by lax procedures and layered misunderstandings.”
The report, crafted by both Republicans and Democrats, describes a series of roadblocks and hurdles that the Senate committee faced in investigating information from Steele, a former MI6 officer hired to investigate Donald Trump on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign.
The report says that Steele “repeatedly refused” to meet with the panel, though he ultimately submitted written responses on Aug. 16, 2018.
The special counsel’s office also refused to provide information about its investigation into the dossier, the report says.
The report said it was limited in its investigation of the dossier because of the “the centralization of information regarding the dossier” at the special counsel’s office, and prosecutors “decision not to share that information with the Committee.”
NEW: Senate Intel report says Mueller's office refused to share information about the Steele dossier, that Chris Steele "repeatedly refused" to meet with the committee. https://t.co/ZZBjDHcswm
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) August 18, 2020
The committee interviewed several Steele associates who helped disseminate the dossier, including Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, former State Department official Jonathan Winer and David Kramer, a former associate of the late-Sen. John McCain.
The FBI relied heavily on information from Steele to obtain warrants to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide who is accused in the dossier of masterminding a conspiracy between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate panel, said in a statement.
The panel raised concerns over Steele’s links to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Steele had “multiple” links to Deripaska, having worked for the Russian’s attorneys from 2012 through 2017.
One section of the report also addresses the possibility that Russian intelligence operatives fed disinformation to Steele that ended up in the dossier.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report released on Dec. 9 said that the FBI received evidence in early 2017 that Russian operatives may have fed false information into Steele’s network of sources.
The committee did find “irrefutable evidence” that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election, and identified several Russian attempts to cozy up to Trump associates during the campaign and presidential transition period.
“The existence of a cadre of informal advisors to the Transition Team with varying levels of access to the President-elect and varying awareness of the foreign affairs presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities,” the report says.
It details interactions during the campaign involving Trump associates George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. It also details the panel’s investigation into a June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City between a group of Russians and Donald Trump Jr., Manafort and Jared Kushner.
The report says that two of the Russians in the meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, likely had ties to the Russian government and Russian intelligence, but that there was no evidence that they provided the campaign with any useful information related to the election.
The report noted what has long been reported, that both Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya worked at the time of the Trump Tower meeting with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele.
The report said that Simpson provided some of the research on a Hillary Clinton donor that Veselnitskaya included in a report that she took into the Trump Tower tryst.
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