Christopher Steele, the former British spy who used his Russian sources and Hillary Clinton’s money to create the anti-Trump dossier at the heart of the Russia investigation, is refusing to respond to U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the probe’s origins.
Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to investigate after special counsel Robert Mueller concluded the 2016 Trump campaign did not collude with Russia.
Reuters reported Steele will not answer questions from Durham, according to a source close to Steele’s London-based private investigation firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
It was the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through the Perkins Coie law firm, that funded Steele’s work.
The Obama administration presented the document as primary evidence to a secret intelligence court to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Steele was a source for the FBI while he worked with the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to compile the dossier. The FBI fired Steele for leaking to the media, but he continued to feed information to the FBI through Justice Department official Bruce Ohr.
Barr told Congress he believes the Obama administration engaged in “spying” on the Trump campaign and planned to investigate.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating issues related to the origin of the Russia probe and plans to issue a report soon.
Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported Mueller spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars on “outside contractors” for his Russia collusion investigation. But Mueller won’t say who he paid, and that has “led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.”
Sperry reported Mueller listed expenses of $732,000 for private investigators and researchers.
“While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile ‘investigative reports’ and other ‘information,'” the report said. And he kept them secret.
Some “suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller’s operation – and even had a hand in his final report – because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017,” the report said.
“Also, Mueller’s lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from Fusion with the media,” he wrote.
Some critics also have asked why Mueller, looking into claims of potential campaign collusion with Russia in 2016, didn’t investigate the Steele dossier.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, posed the question to Attorney General William Barr in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. He noted the dossier was “central” to the claims that there was collusion.
“Now, here’s the irony,” the senator said. “The Mueller report spent millions investigating and found no collusion between Trump campaign and Russia. But the Democrats paid for a document created by a foreign national with reported foreign government sources. Not Trump, but the Democrats.
“That’s the definition of collusion,” he emphasized. “Despite the central status of the Steele dossier to the collusion narrative, the Mueller report failed to analyze whether the Steele dossier was filled with disinformation to mislead us intelligence agencies and the FBI.”
