Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

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      Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing

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      The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor’s Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings “plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself, saying those accusations about his intentions were “simply not true.” He said he had “valid and straightforward reasons” for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.“If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information,” he wrote.But even as he did not acknowledge any problem with how he couched his filing last week, Mr. Durham said he would make future filings under seal if they contained “information that legitimately gives rise to privacy issues or other concerns that might overcome the presumption of public access to judicial documents.”Former President Donald J. Trump has seized on the inaccurate reporting to declare that there is now “indisputable evidence” of a Clinton campaign conspiracy against him — and to suggest that there ought to be executions. Mr. Trump, Fox News hosts and others have also criticized mainstream journalists for not covering the purported revelation.The dispute traces back to a pretrial motion in the case Mr. Durham has brought against Mr. Sussmann accusing him of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. where he relayed concerns about possible cyberlinks between Mr. Trump and Russia. The bureau later dismissed those as unfounded.Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the F.B.I. official he had no clients, but was really there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Mr. Sussmann denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.Several sentences of the filing recounted a second meeting, in February 2017, where Mr. Sussmann had presented different concerns about odd internet data and Russia to the C.I.A., which came from the same cybersecurity researchers who developed the suspicions he had presented to the F.B.I.At the C.I.A. meeting, Mr. Sussmann shared concerns about data that suggested that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from Mr. Joffe. The court filing also stated that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and accused Mr. Joffe — whom Mr. Durham has not charged with any crime — and his associates of having “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.In the fall, The New York Times had reported on Mr. Sussmann’s C.I.A. meeting and the concerns he had relayed about the data suggesting the presence of Russian-made YotaPhones — smartphones that are rarely seen in the United States — in proximity to Mr. Trump and in the White House.But over the weekend, the conservative news media treated those sentences in Mr. Durham’s filing as a new revelation while significantly embellishing what it had said. Mr. Durham, some outlets inaccurately reported, had said he had discovered that the Clinton campaign had paid Mr. Joffe’s company to spy on Mr. Trump. But the campaign had not paid his company, and the filing did not say so. Some outlets also quoted Mr. Durham’s filing as using the word “infiltrate,” a word it did not contain.Most important, the coverage about purported spying on the Trump White House was premised on the idea that the White House network data involved came from when Mr. Trump was president. But Mr. Durham’s filing did not say when it was from.Lawyers for a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped analyze the Yota data said on Monday that the data came from the Obama presidency. Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers said the same in a filing on Monday night complaining about Mr. Durham’s conduct.Mr. Durham did not directly address that basic factual dispute. But his explanation for why he included the information about the matter in the earlier filing implicitly confirmed that Mr. Sussmann had conveyed concerns about White House data that came from before Mr. Trump was president.The purpose of the earlier filing was to ask a judge to look at potential conflicts of interest on Mr. Sussmann’s legal team. Mr. Durham included those paragraphs, he wrote, in part because one of the potential conflicts was that a member of the defense had worked for the White House “during the relevant events that involved” the White House.The defense lawyer in question is Michael Bosworth, who was a deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration.Separately on Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann filed a pretrial motion asking a judge to dismiss the case.They argued that even if Mr. Sussmann did falsely say at the F.B.I. meeting that he had no client — which they deny — that would not rise to a “material” false statement, meaning one affecting a government decision. The decision facing the F.B.I. was whether to open an investigation about the concerns he relayed at that meeting, and it would have done so regardless, they said.Mr. Durham has said Mr. Sussmann’s supposed lie was material because had the F.B.I. known that he was acting “as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda,” agents might have asked more questions or taken additional steps before opening an investigation. More

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      Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track

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      The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.(Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.“Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said. More

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      Evidence Muddles Durham’s Case on Sussmann’s F.B.I. Meeting

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      One disclosure dovetails with the special counsel John Durham’s indictment against Michael Sussmann, while several others clash with it.WASHINGTON — When a special counsel accused a prominent cybersecurity lawyer of lying to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible links to Russia, the indictment presented a lengthy narrative but the direct evidence appeared lean.The indictment said the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had made a false statement by telling an F.B.I. official that he was not representing a client in presenting the information. Mr. Sussmann, who has pleaded not guilty, has denied saying that. No one else was present and their conversation was not recorded, so the direct and clearly admissible evidence appeared to boil down to one witness.This week, additional pieces of evidence emerged into public view that were not in the indictment — one of which appears to dovetail with the accusation against Mr. Sussmann by the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration, while several others appear to conflict with it. The material emerged in court filings and at a status conference before a judge on Wednesday.It is not clear whether all of the newly disclosed evidence will be admissible. But the jostling between prosecutors and defense lawyers could offer a preview of aspects of the trial, which they said on Wednesday would last about two weeks and Judge Christopher R. Cooper said could begin in May or early June.While the charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, it has received significant political attention in part because Mr. Durham concluded that the Hillary Clinton campaign had helped push the suspicions, which concerned possible secret communications between computer servers associated with Mr. Trump’s company and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. The F.B.I. decided the suspicions were unfounded.In accusing Mr. Sussmann of telling the F.B.I. official — James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel — that he had no clients, Mr. Durham claimed that Mr. Sussmann was actually representing both a technology executive and the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann, via his lawyers, denied that he told Mr. Baker that he had no client, while maintaining he was there on behalf of only the executive, not the campaign.One piece of newly disclosed evidence, described in a filing by Mr. Durham’s team on Tuesday evening, consists of handwritten notes by an F.B.I. lawyer to whom Mr. Baker spoke about the meeting that day. The Durham filing quoted the notes as saying “no specific client.”That evidence is similar to another set of handwritten notes previously cited in the indictment by another F.B.I. official who also spoke to Mr. Baker after the meeting. The indictment quoted those notes as listing Mr. Sussmann’s name, then a dash, then the name of his law firm, then a dash, and then the words “said not doing this for any client.”It is not clear whether such notes — or testimony by the F.B.I. officials who took them — would be admissible at a trial under complex rules of evidence. Those rules generally ban statements made outside court as hearsay, but they make exceptions subject to judges’ interpretations.The indictment also said that in February 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with the C.I.A. and conveyed similar and related concerns, citing a post-meeting memorandum by two agency employees that said he was “not representing a particular client.” Mr. Durham portrayed that as showing Mr. Sussmann had repeated a false statement.But at the hearing on Wednesday, a lawyer for Mr. Sussmann, Sean Berkowitz, cited evidence turned over by the prosecutors last week that muddies that picture by suggesting he may instead have told them he had a client.Emails by agency personnel ahead of the meeting, Mr. Berkowitz said, included statements like “Sussmann said he represents a client who does not want to be known” and “the plan should be to convince Sussmann that it is in his and his client’s interest to go to the F.B.I.” A draft version of the agency’s post-meeting memo also referred to Mr. Sussmann having a client, he said.A prosecutor working for Mr. Durham, Andrew DeFilippis, told the judge that “although we’re not, you know, interested in a full factual debate before the court,” an agency employee had spotted the reference to a client in the draft memo and “corrected” it for the final version. Mr. De Filippis did not address references to a client in the earlier emails.Those disclosures followed a court filing on Monday by Mr. Sussmann’s defense team that revealed contradictory things Mr. Baker had said under oath about the key interaction in Justice Department interviews, which Mr. Durham’s team disclosed to them last week.In 2019 and 2020 interviews, Mr. Baker recalled the interaction in two different ways that each clashed with the indictment’s version. In the first, he said Mr. Sussmann told him the cyberexperts who developed the Alfa Bank theory “were his clients.” In the second, he said Mr. Sussmann never said if he was representing anyone and Mr. Baker didn’t ask, but assumed he had no client.In the Tuesday court filing, Mr. Durham’s team accused the defense of “cherry-picking” the evidence and putting forward a “skewed portrayal.”The 2019 and 2020 interviews “occurred years after the events in question, and Mr. Baker made these statements before he had the opportunity to refresh his recollection with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous notes,” they said, adding that he had since “affirmed and then re-affirmed his now-clear recollection of the defendant’s false statement.” More

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      Defendant in Case Brought by Durham Says New Evidence Undercuts Charge

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      Lawyers for Michael Sussmann, accused by the Trump-era special counsel of lying to the F.B.I., asked for a quick trial after receiving what they said was helpful material from prosecutors.WASHINGTON — The defense team for a cybersecurity lawyer who was indicted in September by a Trump-era special counsel asked a judge on Monday to set a trial date sooner than the prosecutor wants — while disclosing evidence recently turned over to them that appears to contradict the charge.The materials could make it harder for the special counsel, John H. Durham, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is guilty of the charge against him: making a false statement to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The newly disclosed evidence consists of records of two Justice Department interviews of the former F.B.I. official to whom Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying, each of which offers a different version of the key interaction than the version in the indictment. That official is the prosecution’s main witness.The existence of the evidence, which Mr. Durham’s team provided to Mr. Sussmann’s team last week, “only underscores the baseless and unprecedented nature of this indictment and the importance of setting a prompt trial date so that Mr. Sussmann can vindicate himself as soon as possible,” the defense lawyers wrote.While Mr. Durham wants to wait until July 25 to start the trial, they said, the defense team urged the judge to set a start date of May 2.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.The indictment centered on a September 2016 meeting between Mr. Sussmann and James A. Baker, who was then the F.B.I.’s general counsel. Mr. Sussmann relayed analysis by cybersecurity researchers who cited odd internet data they said appeared to reflect some kind of covert communications between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution. (The F.B.I. briefly looked into the Alfa Bank suspicions, but dismissed them as unfounded.)Mr. Durham’s indictment accused Mr. Sussmann of falsely saying he was not there on behalf of any client. Through his lawyers, Mr. Sussmann has denied saying that to Mr. Baker.The indictment also said that Mr. Sussmann was in fact representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has maintained he was only there on behalf of the executive, and not the Clinton campaign.Different statements by James Baker, a former F.B.I. general counsel, are at the heart of the legal battle.via C-SPANNo one else was present at the meeting, and if the trial boils down to pitting Mr. Baker’s memory against Mr. Sussmann’s, the newly disclosed evidence will provide fodder for the defense team to show that Mr. Baker’s accounts of that aspect of the meeting have been inconsistent, and to raise doubts about the reliability of the version cited by Mr. Durham.The newly disclosed evidence consists of partly redacted records of two of Mr. Baker’s interviews with the Justice Department. The court filing appended copies of several pages of a transcript and an interview report.In July 2019, Mr. Baker was interviewed by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the meeting. Mr. Baker stated, according to a two-page transcript excerpt, that Mr. Sussmann had brought him information “that he said related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cybersecurity experts, had found.”The newly disclosed evidence also includes a page of a report Mr. Durham’s team made to summarize an interview they conducted with Mr. Baker in June 2020. According to that report, Mr. Baker did not say that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client. Rather, he said the issue never came up and he merely assumed Mr. Sussmann was not conveying the Alfa Bank data and analysis for any client.“Baker said that Sussmann did not specify that he was representing a client regarding the matter, nor did Baker ask him if he was representing a client,” the Durham team’s report said. “Baker said it did not seem like Sussmann was representing a client.”Mr. Baker later told Bill Priestap, then the F.B.I.’s top counterintelligence official, about the meeting. According to the indictment, Mr. Priestap’s handwritten notes list Mr. Sussmann’s name and law firm and then, after a dash, states “said not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)The former Trump administration attorney general, William P. Barr, appointed Mr. Durham to scour the Russia investigation for evidence of wrongdoing by government officials pursuing it. The Sussmann indictment, however, portrayed the F.B.I. as a victim.Mr. Durham used the narrow charge against Mr. Sussmann to put out, in a 27-page indictment, large amounts of other information.He showed that Mr. Sussmann had interacted about Alfa Bank with a colleague at his law firm who represented the Clinton campaign, and that in accounting for his own time on the Alfa Bank matter in law firm billing records, Mr. Sussmann listed the campaign as the client. (Mr. Sussmann had represented the Democratic Party about Russia’s hacking of its servers.)Mr. Durham also put out significant amounts of information about the technology executive and three other cybersecurity researchers who had discovered the odd internet data and developed the theory that it reflected some kind of hidden communications, including mining emails in which they discussed what it might mean.Although Mr. Durham did not charge the researchers with any crime, he insinuated that they did not really believe what they were saying. Mr. Trump and his supporters seized on the indictment, saying it showed the Alfa Bank suspicions were a hoax by Clinton supporters and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Lawyers for those data scientists have pushed back, saying their clients believed their theory was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do. They have also accused Mr. Durham of putting forward a misleading portrayal in his indictment by selectively excerpting fragments of their clients’ emails, omitting portions that showed their clients enthusiastically supported the final analysis.The transcript and statement add to materials already in the public record, in which Mr. Sussmann and Mr. Baker recalled that meeting in sworn testimony in ways that do not clearly dovetail with the indictment’s accusation.In a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he had sought the meeting on behalf of a client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data. And in a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client.” More

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      Discredited Steele Dossier Doesn't Undercut Russia Inquiry

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      Donald J. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.” That is not what the facts indicate.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a “hoax.”But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts.What was the Steele dossier?It was a series of memos about purported Trump-Russia links written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, during the 2016 campaign.It cited unnamed sources who claimed there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes. In addition to giving his memos to his client, Mr. Steele gave some to the F.B.I. and reporters. Buzzfeed published 35 pages in January 2017.Many things that were not immediately apparent about the dossier have since become clearer. It grew out of a political opposition research effort to dig up information about Mr. Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with a research firm called Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele in turn hired Igor Danchenko, the recently indicted researcher, to canvass for information from people he knew, including in Europe and Russia.What was the Russia investigation?It was a counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into the Russian operation to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking and anonymously dumping Democratic emails and by spreading propaganda using fake accounts on American social media platforms. The scrutiny of Russia’s activities included examining the nature of links between Trump campaign associates and Russians to see if there was any coordination.The F.B.I. launched the investigation in July 2016, and a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, eventually took over. His March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and established that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” He did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy.Was the dossier a reliable source of information?No. It has become clear over time that its sourcing was thin and sketchy.No corroborating evidence has emerged in intervening years to support many of the specific claims in the dossier, and government investigators determined that one key allegation — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.When the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017, he told the bureau that he thought the tenor of the dossier was more conclusive than was justified; for example, Mr. Danchenko portrayed the blackmail tape story as rumors and speculation that he was not able to confirm. He also said a key source had called him without identifying himself, and that he had guessed at the source’s identity. The indictment accuses Mr. Danchenko of lying about that call and of concealing that a Democratic Party-linked public relations executive was his source for a claim about Trump campaign office politics.Did the F.B.I. open the investigation because of the dossier?No. Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated that the F.B.I. based the Russia investigation on the dossier. But when counterintelligence agents launched the effort on July 30, 2016, they did not yet know about the dossier. An inspector general report established that Mr. Steele’s reports reached that counterintelligence team on Sept. 19, 2016.The basis for the investigation was instead that WikiLeaks had disrupted the Democratic National Convention by releasing Democratic emails believed to have been stolen by Russian hackers, and that an Australian diplomat said a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser had bragged to him about apparent outreach from Russia involving an offer to help the campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Mrs. Clinton.Did the F.B.I. take any investigative step based on the dossier?Yes. The F.B.I. took the dossier seriously based on Mr. Steele’s reputation, and used some of it — without independent verification — for a narrow purpose that led to a dead end and became a political debacle. It included several claims from Mr. Steele’s memos in applications to wiretap Carter A. Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser with ties to Russia. In 2019, the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for numerous flaws in those wiretap applications.While the dossier-tainted wiretap of Mr. Page has received significant attention, it was a small part of the overall investigation, which issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communications records, made 13 requests to foreign governments under mutual legal assistance treaties, and interviewed about 500 witnesses. Mr. Page was not charged with a crime, and only a handful of the 448 pages in the Mueller report focus on him.Did investigators rely on the dossier for their findings?No. The Mueller report does not present claims from the dossier as evidence, and many of the issues focused on by investigators did not come up in the dossier.The dossier makes no mention, for example, of a July 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and senior campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr., who eagerly accepted the request for a meeting after being told they were bringing dirt on Mrs. Clinton.Nor does the dossier mention that in August 2016, Konstantin V. Kilimnik — described in the 2019 Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” and in a partly declassified, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020 as a “Russian intelligence officer” with possible ties to Russia’s election interference operations — flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.Investigators established that the two had discussed whether Mr. Trump, if elected, would bless a peace plan effectively allowing Russia to control eastern Ukraine, and that Mr. Manafort had shared internal polling data and campaign strategy information with Mr. Kilimnik, which the Treasury Department later said he passed on to a Russian spy agency. (The government has not declassified evidence for its escalating accusations about Mr. Kilimnik.)The Senate report said Mr. Manafort’s “willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services” represented a “grave counterintelligence threat.”Did Mueller rely on the dossier for any criminal charges?No. The special counsel investigation led to indictments of 34 people and three companies. Many of those indicted — like Mr. Kilimnik — reside abroad and have not faced trial. Mr. Mueller obtained nine guilty pleas or jury convictions, including half a dozen close Trump associates. None of those indictments cited the dossier as evidence.The fact that Mr. Mueller did not obtain sufficient evidence to charge Trump associates with conspiracy is subject to disputed interpretations that overlap with the debate over the dossier’s significance. Trump supporters frame the lack of conspiracy charges as proof there was no collusion. By combining this with the false premise that there would not have been any Russia investigation without the Steele dossier, they portray Mr. Trump as a victim of a hoax.Beyond pointing out that there is a range of cooperation and coordination that falls short of the legal definition of “conspiracy,” Trump skeptics argue that Mr. Mueller never definitively got to the bottom of what happened in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the investigation — like dangling a pardon before Mr. Manafort to keep him from cooperating.What was the main impact of the dossier?Beyond its narrow role in facilitating the F.B.I.’s wiretap of Mr. Page, the dossier’s publication had the broader consequence of amplifying an atmosphere of suspicion about Mr. Trump.Still, the dossier did not create this atmosphere of suspicion. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Russia had been a topic of significant discussion dating back to the campaign, including before the first report that Russia had hacked Democrats and before Mr. Steele drafted his reports and gave some to reporters.Among the reasons: Mr. Trump had said flattering things about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, kept bringing on advisers with ties to Russia, had financial ties to Russia, publicly encouraged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton, and at his nominating convention, the party dropped a plank that called for arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels. In March 2017, the F.B.I. publicly acknowledged that it was investigating links between Russia and Trump campaign associates. More

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      What the Steele Dossier Reveals About the FBI

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      This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Steele Dossier Indicted the Media

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      On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News published a photo rendition of a 35-page memo titled “U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship With the Kremlin.”Those who were online that evening remember the jolt. Yes, these were just allegations, but perhaps this was the Rosetta Stone of Trump corruption, touching everything from dodgy real estate negotiations to a sordid hotel-room tryst, all tied together by the president-elect’s obeisance to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.Sure, the memo provided little hard evidence or specific detail, but, BuzzFeed said, it had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.” This, along with tantalizing tidbits like “Source A confided” or “confirmed by Source E,” gave it a patina of authenticity, especially to those unaware that spycraft often involves chasing unverified information down dead ends. Any caveats — even BuzzFeed’s own opening description of the allegations as “explosive but unverified” — could be dismissed as a kind of obligatory cautiousness.That memo, soon to become known as the “Steele dossier” when a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was publicly identified as its author, would inspire a slew of juicy, and often thinly sourced, articles and commentaries about Mr. Trump and Russia.Now it has been largely discredited by two federal investigations and the indictment of a key source, leaving journalists to reckon how, in the heat of competition, so many were taken in so easily because the dossier seemed to confirm what they already suspected.Many of the dossier’s allegations have turned out to be fictitious or, at best, unprovable. That wasn’t for want of trying by reporters from mainstream and progressive media outlets. Many journalists did show restraint. The New York Times’s Adam Goldman was asked by the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple about two years ago how reporters should have approached an unverified rumor from the dossier. He responded, “By not publishing.”Others couldn’t wait to dive in.Two reporters in McClatchy’s Washington bureau, for example, wrote that the special counsel Robert Mueller had found evidence for one of the most tantalizing bits of the dossier, that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen secretly visited Prague during the 2016 campaign. That would have been a key link in the claim that he was there to coordinate campaign strategy with the Russians. It wasn’t true.Over time, the standards for proof diminished to the point that if something couldn’t be proved to be false, the assumption was that it was probably true. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow once put it: A number of the elements “remain neither verified nor proven false, but none so far have been publicly disproven.”Or journalists would take Mr. Trump’s other serious misdeeds and tie them to the dossier. So his alleged sexual relationship with Stormy Daniels, who appeared in pornographic films, became the backup for the dossier’s claim of a lurid round with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. “The count is growing higher and higher of porn actresses,” Slate’s editor at the time, Jacob Weisberg, said on MSNBC, adding, “The whole picture starts to be more plausible, the picture that’s painted in the dossier.” Natasha Bertrand, who was then a staff writer at The Atlantic, chimed in, “It makes it much more plausible that Trump did go to Russia and he did have these kinds of sexual escapades with prostitutes.”The dossier’s credibility suffered a grievous blow in December 2019, when an investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general found that F.B.I. investigations “raised doubts about the reliability of some of Steele’s reports.” The F.B.I. “also assessed the possibility that Russia was funneling disinformation to Steele,” the report said, adding that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered” by investigators.Then, this month, a primary source of Mr. Steele’s was arrested and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about how he obtained information that appeared in the dossier. Prosecutors say that the source, Igor Danchenko, did not, as The Wall Street Journal first reported, get his information from a self-proclaimed real estate partner of Mr. Trump’s. That prompted a statement promising further examination from The Journal and something far more significant from The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee. She took a step that is almost unheard-of: removing large chunks of erroneous articles from 2017 and 2019, as well as an offending video.So where did much of the press go wrong?The first problem was this: There is no doubt that Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor and that he and his family were eager to do business in Russia. Moreover, Mr. Mueller showed, and filed indictments that explained, how the Russians interfered in the 2016 campaign by targeting voter-registration systems, hacking into Democrats’ emails and taking advantage of Facebook and other social media companies to foment dissent and unrest.Mr. Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia. Those fears were borne out when a bipartisan Senate committee found Mr. Manafort to be a “grave counterintelligence threat” because of his ties to a Kremlin agent. So, given all those connections, it was easy to assume that the dossier’s allegations must also be true. The distinction between what journalists assume and what we verify is often the difference between fiction and reality.Journalists also had to deal with the fact that many of the denials came from confirmed liars. The night that BuzzFeed went live with the dossier, Mr. Cohen told the website Mic that the material was “so ridiculous on so many levels” and that “this fake-news nonsense needs to stop.” (Mr. Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal charges including lying to banks and Congress, but even after he provided evidence against Mr. Trump, he said the Prague allegation was false.)The day after the dossier came out, Mr. Trump told reporters: “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.” (Washington Post fact-checkers would eventually catalog more than 30,000 Trump falsehoods during his term in the White House.) When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true.The situation also became complicated because some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side. He had been berating journalists as charlatans while seeking their acclaim; calling on legislators to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue news organizations; and launching personal attacks, especially on female reporters of color. In a perfect world, journalists would treat people they don’t like the same way they treat those they do like, but this is not a perfect world.As the former Times reporter Barry Meier writes in his book “Spooked,” “Plenty of reporters were skeptical of the dossier, but they hesitated to dismiss it, because they didn’t want to look like they were carrying water for Trump or his cronies.”None of this should minimize the endemic and willful deceptions of the right-wing press. From Fox News’s downplaying of the Covid-19 threat to OAN’s absurd defense of Mr. Trump’s lies about the election, conservative media outlets have built their own echo chamber, to the detriment of the country.But news organizations that uncritically amplified the Steele dossier ought to come to terms with their records, sooner or later. This is hard, but it’s not unprecedented. When The Miami Herald broke the news in 1987 that the Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was seeing a woman other than his wife, the paper followed that scoop with a 7,000-plus-word examination of its investigation, which showed significant flaws in how the paper surveilled its target.More than two decades ago, after New York Times articles identified a scientist at Los Alamos as being investigated for having a role in a spying scheme, which federal investigators were unable to substantiate, the paper ran both an extensive editors’ note and an article that included details about how its reporting had gone astray.Newsrooms that can muster an independent, thorough examination of how they handled the Steele dossier story will do their audience, and themselves, a big favor. They can also scrutinize whether, by focusing so heavily on the dossier, they helped distract public attention from Mr. Trump’s actual misconduct. Addressing the shortcomings over the dossier doesn’t mean ignoring the corruption and democracy-shattering conduct that the Trump administration pushed for four years. But it would mean coming to terms with our conduct and whatever collateral damage these errors have caused to our reputation.In the meantime, journalists could follow the advice I once got from Paul Steiger, who was the managing editor of The Journal when I was editing articles for the front page. Several of us went to his office one day, eager to publish a big scoop that he believed wasn’t rock solid. Mr. Steiger told us to do more reporting — and when we told him that we’d heard competitors’ footsteps, he responded, “Well, there are worse things in this world than getting beaten on a story.”Bill Grueskin, a professor of professional practice and former academic dean at Columbia Journalism School, has held senior editing positions at The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Bloomberg News.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      FBI Raids Homes Linked to Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska

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      Agents investigating whether Oleg Deripaska violated U.S. sanctions searched homes he has used in New York and Washington, D.C.Agents raided homes that Oleg V. Deripaska had used in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row, as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions the United States imposed on him.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressF.B.I. agents on Tuesday morning searched homes linked to the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions imposed on him by the United States, according to people with knowledge of the matter and a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska.The searches were carried out more or less simultaneously by agents in New York and Washington and were part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the people said.Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and was convicted in 2018 of financial fraud and other crimes.A spokesman for the F.B.I. office in New York would say only that the agents were “conducting a law enforcement operation pursuant to a law enforcement investigation,” and did not provide details on the nature or scope of the inquiry. A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment.But a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska issued a statement confirming the searches, and saying that the investigation was related to U.S. sanctions.“The F.B.I. is carrying out a search at two houses — located in Washington and New York — belonging to Mr. Deripaska’s relatives,” said the spokeswoman, Larisa Belyaeva. “The searches are being carried out on the basis of two court orders, connected to U.S. sanctions.”The agents searching the Greenwich Village house arrived in the early morning hours in about half a dozen SUVs and were seen leaving the building carrying several large flat rectangular boxes like those used to transport paintings.The raid on the home in Washington was reported earlier by NBC News.In 2018, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against Mr. Deripaska and his mammoth aluminum company, saying he had profited from the “malign activities” of Russia around the world. In announcing the sanctions, the Trump administration cited accusations that Mr. Deripaska had been accused of extortion, racketeering, bribery, links to organized crime and even ordering the murder of a businessman.Mr. Deripaska denied the allegations supporting the sanctions, and his allies contended that the sanctions were punishment for refusing to play ball with the Americans.The Trump administration lifted the sanctions against Mr. Deripaska’s companies in 2019 under an agreement intended to reduce his control and ownership, though a confidential document showed the deal may have been less punitive than advertised, leaving him and his allies with majority ownership of his most important company.Weeks later, Mr. Deripaska unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government to overturn the sanctions on him, alleging they were levied without due process and were based on unproven smears that fell outside the sanctions program.In the lawsuit, Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers claimed that the sanctions had cost him billions of dollars, made him “radioactive” in international business circles, and exposed him to criminal investigation and asset confiscation in Russia.The sanctions restrict his ability to own property or do business in the United States.Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel to the United States has also been restricted in the past, though he had managed visits to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii before the sanctions, people familiar with his travel said.And he has also been a subject of investigations by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn for several years, according to people with knowledge of those inquiries, but it is unclear whether the searches have any connection to those matters.The oligarch also came under scrutiny from the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, because of his connections to Mr. Manafort.Mr. Deripaska hired Mr. Manafort and signed his firm to a $10-million-a-year contract in 2006 at least partly to help him with his visa, which the U.S. government revoked. Mr. Deripaska eventually fired Mr. Manafort and his partner and later sued them over an unsuccessful telecommunications venture they had pursued together.Mr. Deripaska was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016.Evgenia Novozhenina/ReutersBut after Mr. Manafort joined Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, he instructed his deputy to periodically provide confidential Trump campaign polling data to an associate that the deputy understood would be shared with Mr. Deripaska, according to a report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the campaign, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant, signaling that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States in exchange for information on possible Russian aid to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Deripaska told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Kremlin collusion in the campaign.Property records show that the homes searched by the F.B.I. on Tuesday — a sprawling mansion in an affluent neighborhood in Northwest Washington and a three-story historic Greenwich Village townhouse that was once a speakeasy called the Pirate’s Den and later home to Mayor Jimmy Walker’s paramour — are owned by opaque limited liability corporations.The L.L.C. that owns the Greenwich Village property is connected to a person identified in British court filings as a cousin of Mr. Deripaska.Nate Schweber More