Dossier author told FBI had source inside Trump Org
WASHINGTON – The former British spy who compiled a controversial dossier alleging coordination between then-candidate Donald Trump and the Kremlin was told that the FBI had “a source” inside the Trump Organization whose information lent some credibility to his findings, a witness told congressional investigators last summer.
Glenn Simpson, founder of the Fusion GPS research firm that hired former British agent Christopher Steele, told investigators that the FBI had shared the existence of “a human source from inside the Trump Organization” in a September 2016 meeting with Steele.
The information came as Steele shared his own findings with a top bureau official in Rome, according to a transcript of the Simpson interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee released Tuesday.
The panel’s top Democrat, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, made public on Tuesday the transcript of a 10-hour interview between congressional investigators and Simpson.
“The American people deserve the opportunity” to learn more, Feinstein said, about the explosive document that Trump and Republican lawmakers have disparaged as fiction.
“The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice,” Feinstein said. “The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.”
The previously undisclosed information about the FBI’s possible inside source was revealed during a lengthy exchange between investigators and Simpson, who said that Steele first proposed that he share the contents of the dossier with the FBI in the summer of 2016 after becoming concerned that “a presidential candidate (Trump) was being blackmailed.”
Steele’s drew upon a range of sources, including figures linked to Russian intelligence, to compile the dossier last year. It was based on raw intelligence gathered by Steele on a wide-range of issues involving Trump, from allegations of shady financial deals with Russians to salacious allegations related to a Trump visit to Moscow.
Simpson said Steele first shared his concerns with the FBI during the first week of July 2016 and in a subsequent meeting with the Rome official two months later when Steele provided the official “a full briefing” of his findings. (At the time, the dossier was being funded by a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, after initial work on the project funded by a Republican donor stopped.)
Following the Rome meeting, Steele told Simpson that the FBI already had amassed similar “details” based on their own intelligence.
“Essentially, what he (Steele) told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and…my understanding was that they believed Chris’ information might be credible,” Simpson told investigators.
According to Simpson, Steele did not know that the FBI had already been investigating the matter when he first met with the bureau.
When he first publicly acknowledged the existence of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to the Kremlin last March, then-FBI Director James Comey said the inquiry had begun in July 2016.
A special counsel and three congressional committees are investigating Russia’s campaign of cyberattacks and fake news to influence the election in favor of Trump.
The transcript’s release comes less than a week after two influential Republican members of the Judiciary committee recommended that the Justice Department launch a criminal investigation into Steele.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. C., a senior member of the panel, suggested Steele may have violated the law by allegedly lying to federal authorities about his contact with reporters regarding information in the dossier.
Grassley blasted Feinstein’s action to make the transcript public, indicating a further political break in the panel’s continuing investigation of Russian interference.
“It’s totally confounding that Sen. Feinstein would unilaterally release a transcript of a witness interview in the middle of an ongoing investigation,” Grassley said in a statement.
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