Obama Era FBI Offered to Pay Dossier Creator to Find Dirt on Flynn Despite Being Skeptical of Information

The Daily Caller reported yesterday that an FBI offer to pay former British spy Christopher Steele to collect intelligence on Michael Flynn in the weeks before the 2016 election has been one of the more overlooked revelations in a Justice Department inspector general’s report released in December.

The reference to the FBI proposal, which was made in a 2016 meeting in an unidentified European city, has received virtually no press attention. But it might have new significance following the recent release of government documents that show that Steele peddled an unfounded rumor that Flynn had an extramarital affair with a Russian woman in the United Kingdom.

It still is not clear how and when Steele came across the rumor, or if it was the result of the FBI asking him to look into Flynn.

The inspector general’s report, released in December of 2019, said that FBI agents offered to pay Steele “significantly” to collect intelligence from three separate “buckets” that the bureau was pursuing as part of Crossfire Hurricane, its counterintelligence probe of four Trump campaign associates.

From the Daily Caller: One bucket was “Additional intelligence/reporting on specific, named individuals (such as [Carter Page] or [Flynn]) involved in facilitating the Trump campaign-Russian relationship,” the IG report stated.

FBI agents also sought contact with “any individuals or sub sources” who Steele could provide to “serve as cooperating witnesses to assist in identifying persons involved in the Trump campaign-Russian relationship.”

Steele at the time had provided the FBI with reports he compiled alleging that members of the Trump campaign had conspired with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.

A Bloomberg opinion article from last month discussed the released Senate report and said that it provided some more context on the Dossier.

From Bloomberg: It says that the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence did not want the bureau to “stand behind” the dossier but that former President Barack Obama’s directive was to “include all information” about Russian interference in the 2016 election. So, despite reservations about the dossier’s accuracy, the bureau believed it had to include it.

This explanation makes no sense. The purpose of an intelligence assessment is not to include just any rumor spies might hear. It is to assess the ocean of information the national security state collects, and to provide analytical judgments about what happened

There were good reasons to doubt the veracity of Steele’s work. Earlier this month, the Justice Department declassified a series of footnotes from the inspector general’s December report. They indicate that the FBI team investigating the Trump campaign knew in early 2017 that some of Steele’s reporting was likely deliberate Russian disinformation. The report itself also notes that even some of Steele’s sources wouldn’t stand by his reporting.

Add it all up, and it’s stunning that a team hand-picked by FBI senior leadership to investigate Trump and Russia would submit the Steele dossier to the secret surveillance court to obtain a warrant — and three subsequent renewals — or, for that matter, to the wider intelligence community as part an assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In August of 2018, The FBI released 71 pages of what it describes as correspondence between the bureau and Steele.

From the NBC article: The heavily redacted records show FBI payments to Steele as a Confidential Human Source (CHS) over an unknown period. They also show that Steele told the FBI he had informed a third party he was acting as a CHS for the bureau, and that the FBI determined Steele had been a source for an online article.

On Nov. 1, 2016, according to the documents, the FBI told Steele it was unlikely to continue working with him, and he should not “obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI.”

The records also indicate that in February 2016 the FBI “admonished” Steele. A federal law enforcement official explains that an admonishment is typically given when a person begins a stint as a confidential informant and annually thereafter. It is a briefing on the rules of being an informant to ensure the source complies with guidelines set by the Attorney General, and usually not criticism of the source.

Because of the redactions, it is not possible to tell when payments to Steele began, but it has previously been reported that he assisted the FBI with past investigations, including a probe of corruption in international soccer.

It all adds up to a massive failure on the part of the FBI and the Obama administration and questions about what everyone knew and when they knew it.