The declassified footnote states that Steele’s primary sub-source “was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his/her documented contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers.” It does not, however, say what the FBI ultimately concluded about the sub-source, who has been publicly identified in the New York Times and other outlets. Horowitz learned that the FBI had identified Steele’s primary sub-source as the target of their former counterintelligence investigation in December 2016 - a detail he included in a footnote of his report that had remained classified until Wednesday.īarr declassified the footnote and included it in a letter to Graham, who is conducting a review of the FBI’s actions during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Though a letter from Barr and his two-page summary do not indicate what the FBI did when it discovered that Steele was relying on this sub-source, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) accused the bureau of withholding the information from a federal court when it used the Steele dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide in late 2016.īarr and Durham’s disclosure to Graham came in response to the senators’ request that the Justice Department declassify a footnote in last year’s report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz documenting significant abuses and missteps in the FBI’s effort to surveil the former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page. The newly disclosed evidence, provided to Senate Republican investigators conducting a parallel review of the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe, was declassified Wednesday by Barr, who provided a two-page summary of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Steele’s sub-source, which stretched from 2009 to 2011. That case remains pending in federal court in Washington.Instead, Durham’s authorization and Barr’s decision to release it to Congress ensures a public airing of portions of his investigation, which President Donald Trump has publicly said he hopes would result in prosecutions of his political adversaries and senior intelligence officials. private research firm - Bean, also known as Fusion GPS - over its role in commissioning the dossier. In addition, the same Russians filed a defamation suit against a D.C. A similar defamation suit that three other Russian tycoons brought against BuzzFeed over publication of the dossier was dismissed by a New York judge in March.
Gubarev’s suit was not the only one BuzzFeed faced over its decision to publish the dossier.
The compilation has returned to the news in recent weeks as Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham obtained an indictment of a so-called sub-source for the dossier, Igor Danchenko, on charges of making false statements to the FBI in interviews about topics covered in the controversial document.ĭanchenko has pleaded not guilty and has been released pending trial, but the allegations in the indictment have prompted many news organizations to reassess their reporting on the dossier. The dossier was the work of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who compiled the information as opposition research on behalf of lawyers working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Gubarev or the companies he headed,” the businessman and the news outlet added. Since then, BuzzFeed has not learned any information that would verify the allegations about Mr. “At the time BuzzFeed published the dossier, it explained to readers that its allegations were unverified. The statement went on to stress that the claims about Gubarev remain unsupported by publicly available evidence. Gubarev accepts that judgment,“ Gubarev and BuzzFeed said in a joint statement. The federal court ruled that BuzzFeed had a right to publish the dossier because it was part of a government investigation, and Mr. Gubarev has decided to end his litigation against BuzzFeed over its publication of the dossier in January 2017. Gubarev appealed that decision to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, but on Wednesday the Russian businessman and BuzzFeed announced that the appeal was being dropped. A federal judge in Miami tossed out the lawsuit in late 2018, ruling that BuzzFeed’s publication of the dossier was legally privileged because of the role the compilation played in ongoing federal investigations, even though the dossier was never formally released by the government.
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