Christopher Steele’s infamous, anti-Trump dossier had almost no corroborating evidence from official intelligence reporting, according to an FBI spreadsheet that evaluted the credibility of the document.
Just the News reported the lack of corroboration left analysts relying on flimsy sources such as a Democratic operative, a Russian propaganda news site and media story leaks that amounted to circular reporting.
The unverified and now largely debunked dossier compiled by a former British was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Nevertheless, it was used by the Obama administration’s FBI as primary evidence to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and advance its Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
The newly revealed, 94-page FBI analysis, posted by Just the News, found no evidence for one of the “most lurid claims,” that Trump was videoed committing lewd sex acts with prostitutes at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. There is no presidential suite listed at the hotel, and there’s no evidence Trump stayed there.
In fact, the FBI found Steele’s “reporting” to be “based in Internet rumors that could never be corroborated.”
The analysis found the Steele dossier was so sloppy that some of the names of key players were misspelled. And it made claims “that were debunked by official travel records like passport entry records.”
One of the most famous claims of the dossier — that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen flew to Prague in summer 2016 to help cover up a Russia-Trump plot — was debunked by the analysts.
Without evidence to back the claims, “analysts often turned to suspect sources, such as biased actors connected to the Democratic National Committee or leaked news media stories that could be traced back to Steele and his boss, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson,” JTN said.
Steele admitted he and Simpson were the source for a Yahoo News article claiming Carter Page was under investigation by the FBI. The article, nevertheless, was the only evidence presented to support the claim that former Trump adviser Carter Page met with a senior Russian official. The FBI later determined the meetings never happened.
“The Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik — often derided as Vladimir Putin propaganda in the Western world — was cited several times by the FBI as the lone source or corroboration for some Steele claims,” JTN said.
The FBI analysts even “used an article written by the journalist sister of DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa — a prominent purveyor of the Trump collusion narrative during the 2016 election — as possible support for Steele’s claim about the Moscow hotel sex story,” reported JTN.
