Ex-FBI officials: Obama order drove push to include Steele dossier in report on Russian interference
by Jerry Dunleavy
| April 21, 2020 05:59 PM
Former top FBI officials pointed to an order from President Barack Obama to explain an effort to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The new revelations were contained in the heavily redacted 158-page bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, which concurred with the January 2017 assessment by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential contest to help then-candidate Donald Trump and to harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But also contained within the mostly blacked out tome were new details about the effort by the FBI’s leadership to use Steele’s unproven allegations in the Russian interference assessment. The revelations are especially relevant days after declassified footnotes from a Justice Department watchdog report strongly suggested the FBI was warned in 2016 and 2017 about the possibility of Russian intelligence services compromising Steele’s work through a Kremlin disinformation campaign. Although officials stressed Steele’s research was not used as a basis for the 2017 Russian meddling assessment, at least some of the dossier claims made their way into a still-classified two-page annex attached to the spy community report.
The Senate report revealed the Intelligence Community Assessment began at the behest of Obama himself in early December 2016 during a meeting of the National Security Council, with the president instructing then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference. The report stated Obama “directed that the report include everything the IC knew about Russian interference in the 2016 elections.â€
Clapper told the committee, “I don’t think we would have mounted the effort we did, probably, to be honest, in the absence of presidential direction, because that kind of cleared the way on sharing all the accesses.â€
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