Steele, Christopher (1964- )

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    In Legal Peril at Home, Trump Turns to a U.K. Court for Vindication

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    On a day when he lashed out at a federal judge in Washington, the former president asked a judge in London to let his lawsuit over the notorious Steele dossier go forward.Donald J. Trump was thousands of miles away from the vaulted chamber in Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice on Monday. But his words echoed in a lawsuit he has filed in London against Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose dossier of unproven links between Mr. Trump and Russia caused a political uproar back in 2017.“The inaccurate personal data in the Dossier has, and continues, to cause me significant damage and distress,” the former president said in a signed statement circulated by his lawyers. “A judgment of the English court on this issue will be an immense relief to me as it will completely confirm the true position to the public.”Mr. Trump’s words came on a day of trans-Atlantic legal maneuvering. At home, he lashed out against a judge in Washington who imposed a limited gag order on him in the federal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In London, lawyers for Mr. Trump invoked their client’s testimony to argue that Mr. Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had breached British data protection laws.This is the first case Mr. Trump has filed in Britain related to the dossier, published just before he took office, and it appears calculated to find more favorable legal terrain after a federal judge in Florida threw out a lawsuit last year that Mr. Trump filed against Mr. Steele, Hillary Clinton, and others, related to the Russia allegations.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said his client would give evidence in court if the justice, Karen Steyn, agreed to let the case go to trial. But a lawyer for Orbis argued that the court should throw out the case because the statute of limitations had expired on Mr. Trump’s claims of data protection violations.Antony White, the lawyer for Orbis, said any damage to Mr. Trump’s reputation resulted from the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed in January 2017, over which Mr. Steele had no control. He also noted that Mr. Trump only brought his case in Britain after his case against Mr. Steele was dismissed in the United States.Mr. White suggested it was a pattern of frivolous litigation against Mr. Steele. He was in the courtroom, taking copious notes and nodding or shaking his head as his lawyers, and Mr. Trump’s, made their arguments on the first day of a two-day hearing.Christopher Steele, center, a former British spy whose dossier of unproven links between Mr. Trump and Russia caused a political uproar in 2017, leaving court after a hearing on Monday in London.Aaron Chown/Press Association, via Associated Press“The claim has no real prospect of success and there is no other compelling reason why it should proceed to a trial,” Mr. Steele’s lawyers said in a filing. “In any event, the claim should be struck out as an abuse of process because it has been brought for an illegitimate and vexatious purpose.”To be sure, none of the inflammatory allegations in Mr. Steele’s dossier — including reports that Mr. Trump made illicit payments to Russian officials or cavorted with prostitutes on visits to Russia — have been substantiated. The F.B.I. concluded that one of the key allegations — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.But Mr. Trump said that Mr. Steele has continued to argue that the dossier was accurate. He cited a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, last May, in which Mr. Steele said, “Our Trump-Russia reporting has not been ‘discredited.’ In fact its main tenets continue to hold up well and almost no detail has been disproven.”Mr. Trump denied that he had subjected Mr. Steele to what Mr. Steele called a “barrage of abuse and threats,” saying he had no role in reported cyberattacks on Mr. Steele’s business or in the publication of the home addresses of his children. Mr. Trump also claimed that Mr. Steele had impugned the reputation of his eldest daughter, Ivanka.“My daughter, Ivanka, is completely irrelevant to this claim and any mention of her only serves to distract this court from the defendant and Mr. Steele’s reckless behavior,” he said in his statement. “Any inference or allegation that Mr. Steele makes about my relationship with my daughter is untrue and disgraceful.”It was not clear what statements by Mr. Steele that Mr. Trump was citing. Mr. Steele exchanged emails with Ms. Trump a decade before her father ran for president, according to ABC News and CNN.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Tomlinson, acknowledged his client was not given to subtlety or precision in his statements, and that Mr. Trump had a long history of litigation in the United States, not all of it successful. He uses language “more familiar to U.S. than U.K. political discourse,” he said.“It’s uncontroversial for me to say President Trump is a controversial figure,” he said. “He often expresses himself in very strong language.”But Mr. Tomlinson said Mr. Trump was entitled to be vindicated, and to receive at least nominal damages, for the reputational harm he had suffered from allegations that he said were entirely erroneous. Though Mr. Steele did not publish the dossier, he said, it would not have existed if he had not produced it.He pointed to a ruling in 2020, in which two Russian business moguls, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, won damages of 18,000 pounds ($22,900) each from Mr. Steele’s firm after they argued that allegations about them in the dossier violated data protection laws.The court ruled that Orbis had “failed to take reasonable steps to verify” claims that Mr. Fridman and Mr. Aven, who controlled Alfa Bank, had made illicit payments to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the judge dismissed several other claims.Mr. Steele has not denied sharing the dossier with journalists. But he rejected the contention that he has sought to promote its contents since then.“I declined to provide any media interviews for three-and-a-half years after the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed, despite being asked multiple times by major international media organizations,” he testified in a witness statement. “If I had wanted to ‘promote’ the dossier as Mr. Trump suggests, I obviously would have taken up those media opportunities.” More

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      Trump Sues Over Steele Dossier on Russia in London Court

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is arguing that the document known as the Steele dossier was calculated to embarrass him and that it breached data protection laws.Donald J. Trump has claimed in a lawsuit in a London court that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, inflicted “personal and reputational damage and distress” on him by leaking a dossier detailing unsavory, unproven accounts of links between him and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.Lawyers for Mr. Trump argue that Mr. Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, breached British data protection laws with the dossier, which triggered a political earthquake when it was published just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017.The lawsuit, the first filed by Mr. Trump in Britain related to the dossier, could offer the former president more favorable legal terrain than the United States. Last year, a federal judge in Florida threw out his lawsuit claiming that Mr. Steele, as well as Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, was involved in a concerted plot to spread false information about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.In a court filing last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said he was “compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing” for him, the filing said, asserting that Mr. Steele had presented the claims in a “sensationalist manner” that was “calculated to cause tremendous embarrassment” to Mr. Trump. He is asking for unspecified compensation.The High Court judge Matthew Nicklin has scheduled a two-day hearing on Oct. 16 and 17, at which arguments will be heard and lawyers for Mr. Steele’s firm will move to throw out the case, which was originally filed last November.The dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, center, in 2020. He has accused Mr. Trump of engaging in “frivolous and abusive legal proceedings” in the United States.Victoria Jones/Press Association, via Associated PressIn a witness statement, Mr. Steele accused Mr. Trump of “numerous public attacks upon me and Orbis.” He said the former president had initiated “frivolous and abusive legal proceedings” against him and his firm in the United States, a conclusion echoed by the Florida judge’s ruling.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did his British lawyers, while Mr. Steele declined to comment.Mr. Trump’s foray into the British courts comes as he is facing a raft of criminal and civil charges in the United States, on accusations ranging from election interference to inflating the value of his real estate assets — all of which he has denied. He has experienced a string of legal setbacks in courtrooms from Manhattan to South Florida.But in London, Mr. Trump is the plaintiff, and legal experts said his lawyers were trying to seize an advantage from Britain’s comparatively tight controls on personal data. Winning a claim that his data had been compromised, these lawyers said, would be easier than winning a claim of defamation.“It avoids the obvious hurdles of a U.K. defamation claim,” said Jay Joshi, a media lawyer with the London firm Taylor Hampton. These include the statute of limitations for defamation, normally a year, and the fact that the dossier was published in the United States, not Britain. “Trump is clearly seeking some form of vindication,” Mr. Joshi said.In 2020, Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology entrepreneur who was cited in the dossier, lost a defamation suit against Mr. Steele. But in another case that year, two Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, won damages of 18,000 pounds ($22,900) each from Mr. Steele’s firm after they argued that allegations about them in the dossier violated data-protection laws.The court ruled that Orbis had “failed to take reasonable steps to verify” claims that Mr. Fridman and Mr. Aven, who controlled Alfa Bank, had made illicit payments to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the judge dismissed several other claims.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are making a similar claim that Mr. Steele’s firm did not confirm the claims about him. Among other things, they said, Mr. Trump did not bribe Russian officials to advance his business interests.“The claimant did not engage in unorthodox behavior in Russia and did not act in a way that Russia authorities were provided with material to blackmail him,” the lawyers said. “The personal data is not accurate. Further, the Defendant failed to take all reasonable steps to insure the personal data was accurate.”Mr. Trump is being represented by Hugh Tomlinson, a leading London media lawyer who specializes in defamation, privacy and data protection. Among his former clients is King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, for whom Mr. Tomlinson argued successfully that a British tabloid should not be allowed to publish his private diaries, which contained astringent comments about the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.The Steele dossier grew out of an opposition research effort to dig up information about Mr. Trump, funded by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn hired Mr. Steele, an expert on Russia, to research Mr. Trump’s business dealings in the country.Mr. Steele shared some of the memos with the F.B.I. and journalists; they first came to light in January 2017 when Buzzfeed published 35 pages.His findings have been largely discredited by the F.B.I. and others who have investigated Mr. Trump’s relationship to Russia. Relying on anonymous sources, the dossier asserted that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that Russian officials had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.For much of his information, Mr. Steele relied on Igor Danchenko, a Russian researcher who told federal investigators that some of the claims were rumors that he had not been able to confirm. Mr. Danchenko was later indicted on a charge of misleading federal investigators, but he was ultimately acquitted.The F.B.I. concluded that one of the most explosive allegations in the dossier — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the 2016 campaign — was false.In his witness statement, Mr. Steele said he wrote the memos on a computer that was not connected to a network and was equipped with security that prohibited any third party from extracting data stored on it. He also said that Orbis no longer held any copy of the dossier on its systems by the end of the first week of January 2017.Mr. Steele has not denied sharing the dossier with journalists. But he rejected the contention that he has sought to promote its contents since then.“I declined to provide any media interviews for three and a half years after the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed, despite being asked multiple times by major international media organizations,” he testified. “If I had wanted to ‘promote’ the dossier as Mr. Trump suggests, I obviously would have taken up those media opportunities.” More

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      Jury Begins Deliberating in Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims

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      The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Trump-era special prosecutor and a defense lawyer delivered starkly clashing views in closing arguments on Monday about the motives of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a key contributor to the so-called Steele dossier.A jury will now decide whether Mr. Danchenko is guilty of lying to the F.B.I. about one of his sources for information in the Steele dossier, a compendium of unsubstantiated assertions that Donald J. Trump and his 2016 campaign were colluding with Russia.The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. An earlier indictment brought by Mr. Durham ended with an acquittal in May, and the trial appears to be his last chance to obtain a conviction in a case he developed.In the closing arguments, a prosecutor working for Mr. Durham asserted that Mr. Danchenko had clearly lied to the F.B.I. and that his false assertions had a material effect. He pointed to part of the dossier that the F.B.I. cited to bolster applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.“This defendant’s lies caused intensive surveillance on a U.S. citizen,” said Michael Keilty, an assistant special counsel.In his own remarks, Mr. Durham sought to broaden the case, telling jurors that “the whole house of cards of the dossier crumbles” under the weight of the evidence.But the defense said the government’s own evidence showed that Mr. Danchenko did not lie. The lawyer, Stuart A. Sears, characterized Mr. Danchenko as a valuable and honest asset to the F.B.I. who unwittingly became embroiled in a politically charged investigation. Mr. Durham, he said, was intent on proving crimes “at any cost” and presumed Mr. Danchenko guilty from the start.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Judge Narrows Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims About Trump

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      Matters deemed tangential to the charges of making false statements, including a notorious and uncorroborated rumor of a sex tape, will be excluded from the case.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, set off political reverberations last year when he unveiled a lengthy indictment of an analyst he accused of lying to the F.B.I. about sources for the so-called Steele dossier, a discredited compendium of political opposition research about purported ties between Donald J. Trump and Russia.But the trial of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, which opens on Tuesday with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Va., now appears likely to be shorter and less politically salient than the sprawling narrative in Mr. Durham’s indictment had suggested the proceeding would be.In an 18-page order last week, the judge overseeing the case, Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, excluded from the trial large amounts of information that Mr. Durham had wanted to showcase — including material that undercuts the credibility of the dossier’s notorious rumor that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.Certain facts Mr. Durham dug up related to that rumor “do not qualify as direct evidence as they are not ‘inextricably intertwined’ or ‘necessary to provide context’ to the relevant charge,” Judge Trenga wrote, adding that they “were substantially outweighed by the danger of confusion and unfair prejudice.”In that and other disputes over evidence, Judge Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, almost always sided with Mr. Danchenko’s defense lawyers. Mr. Durham, they said, had tried to inject irrelevant issues into the trial in “an unnecessary and impermissible attempt to make this case about more than it is.”Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the larger significance of the trial, which is likely to be Mr. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has used to hear evidence has expired, suggesting he will bring no further indictments.Mr. Durham is also writing a report to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who succeeded the Trump administration official who appointed him as special counsel, William P. Barr.Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the significance of the trial, which is likely to be John H. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesThe dossier, which is at the heart of the Danchenko trial, attracted significant public attention when BuzzFeed published it in January 2017. Mr. Trump and his supporters frequently try to conflate it with the official Russia inquiry or falsely claim that it was the basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation.But the F.B.I. did not open the investigation based on the dossier, and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence. The F.B.I. did cite some claims from the dossier in applying for court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsElection Fraud Claims: A new report says that major social media companies continue to fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.Russian Falsehoods: Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming the West for disrupting the global food supply have bled into right-wing chat rooms and mainstream conservative news media in the United States.Media Literacy Efforts: As young people spend more time online, educators are increasingly trying to offer students tools and strategies to protect themselves from false narratives.Global Threat: New research shows that nearly three-quarters of respondents across 19 countries with advanced economies are very concerned about false information online.The dossier grew out of opposition research indirectly funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with the research firm Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to a company run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.Mr. Steele in turn subcontracted to Mr. Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst living in the United States, who canvassed people he knew, including in Europe and Russia. Mr. Danchenko verbally relayed what the analyst later called “raw intelligence” — essentially uncorroborated gossip — to Mr. Steele, who drafted the dossier.A bureau counterintelligence analyst determined Mr. Danchenko’s identity and the F.B.I. first spoke to him in early 2017, during which he said he had not seen the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. Its tenor was more conclusive than was justified, he said, and he portrayed the blackmail tape story as mere rumor and speculation.Mr. Danchenko talked to the F.B.I. for hours about what he had gathered, and court filings by Mr. Durham disclosed that the bureau formally deemed him a confidential human source.An inspector general report revealed in late 2019 that Mr. Danchenko’s interview had raised doubts about the credibility of the dossier and criticized the bureau for failing to tell that to a court in wiretap renewal applications that continued to cite it. The report essentially portrayed Mr. Danchenko, whom it did not name, as a truth-teller, and the F.B.I. as deceptive.But after further investigation, Mr. Durham accused Mr. Danchenko of deceiving the F.B.I. — including by concealing that a public relations executive with ties to Democrats, Charles Dolan, had been his source for a minor claim involving office politics in the Trump campaign. That assertion made its way into the dossier.At the trial, Mr. Danchenko’s defense will apparently be that the F.B.I. asked him whether he had ever “talked” to Mr. Dolan about information in the dossier and that his somewhat equivocal denial was true: They had instead communicated by writing about that topic.Mr. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the F.B.I.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDefense lawyers had asked Judge Trenga to throw out the charge, arguing that the particular statute Mr. Danchenko had been charged with covers only affirmative misstatements, not misleading omissions. The judge has characterized that issue as a close call but let it go forward, while suggesting he could revisit the question later.Mr. Durham had also wanted to present striking but inconclusive evidence: In the summer of 2016, when Mr. Danchenko went to Moscow to gather rumors like the one about a purported sex tape, Mr. Dolan was staying at the hotel where the tape had supposedly been filmed three years earlier — and toured the suite where Mr. Trump had stayed.But Mr. Dolan told Mr. Durham’s team that he had never heard the tape rumor until BuzzFeed published the dossier, and Mr. Durham did not claim that Mr. Dolan was a source of the rumor. The judge excluded that information from the trial as irrelevant to the false statements Mr. Danchenko is charged with making.Mr. Durham also brought four false-statement charges against Mr. Danchenko related to accusations that he lied to the F.B.I. about a person he said had called and provided information without identifying himself.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. he believed the caller had probably been Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, but Mr. Durham contends that is a lie and Mr. Danchenko never believed that.Like Mr. Steele, Mr. Millian is abroad; he refused to come to the United States to be a witness at the trial. The judge has also ruled inadmissible two emails Mr. Millian apparently wrote about Mr. Danchenko in 2020 denying that he talked to Mr. Danchenko.The “emails lack the necessary ‘guarantees of trustworthiness’ as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts,” the judge wrote.After Mr. Durham was assigned to investigate the Russia investigation in the spring of 2019, Mr. Trump and his supporters stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against him and charge high-level F.B.I. and intelligence officials with crimes.But instead, Mr. Durham developed two cases on narrow charges of false statements involving outside efforts to uncover links between Mr. Trump and Russia. One was against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with Democratic ties who was acquitted of lying to the F.B.I. when he shared a tip about possible connections between Mr. Trump and Russia. Another was against Mr. Danchenko.Mr. Durham filled court filings with copious amounts of information seemingly extraneous to the charges, while insinuating that Democrats had conspired to frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.While that was not the theoretical conspiracy Mr. Trump and his supporters at outlets like Fox News had originally focused on, Mr. Durham’s filings provided fodder for them to stoke grievances about the Russia investigation. But judges in both cases have proved skeptical about putting much of that material before a jury.In both instances, however, Mr. Durham’s earlier filings had already made that information public.Mr. Danchenko was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation more than a decade ago, after the F.B.I. received a tip that he had made a remark that someone interpreted as an offer to buy classified information. He had also had contact with someone at the Russian embassy believed to be an intelligence officer. The bureau closed the case in 2011 without charging him.Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by bringing to light evidence that President Vladimir V. Putin likely plagiarized parts of his dissertation — has denied being a Russian agent and said he has no memory of the purported remark. For now, the judge has barred Mr. Durham’s team from introducing details about that inquiry, although prosecutors can tell the jury that there had been one.In an interview last month with the conservative Washington Examiner, Mr. Barr suggested that despite the special counsel’s limited achievements in the courtroom, the investigation was a success from another point of view.“I think Durham got out a lot of important facts that fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” Mr. Barr said, adding that he expected “the Danchenko trial will also allow for a lot of this story to be told, whether or not he’s ultimately convicted.” More

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      Democrats Agree to Pay $113,000 Over Campaign Spending Inquiry

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      Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party described payments to a law firm that commissioned scrutiny of Trump-Russia ties — leading to the Steele dossier — as legal services, not opposition research.WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic Party have agreed to pay $113,000 in fines to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated a campaign finance disclosure law when they funded an opposition research effort into Donald J. Trump and Russia that resulted in a discredited document known as the Steele dossier.During the 2016 race, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained a law firm, Perkins Coie, which in turn hired a research group, Fusion GPS, that commissioned what became the dossier. In campaign spending disclosures, the campaign and the party said their payments to Perkins Coie were for legal services, not opposition research.Dan Backer, a conservative lawyer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on behalf of a group he leads, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. It accused the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party of illegally hiding that they had been funding an opposition research effort.The commission has not yet made public the findings of its investigation. But the agency sent a letter about the inquiry and its resolution to Mr. Backer on Tuesday, which he posted on his group’s website. The letter said the commission agreed that the campaign and the party had probably violated campaign finance law.“We’re thrilled to have caused some modicum of accountability against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee,” Mr. Backer said, arguing that the dossier had damaged American democracy. He added, “It’s not enough and it should be more.”Graham Wilson, a lawyer representing both the campaign and the party in the matter, did not respond to a request for comment. But Daniel Wessel, a Democratic National Committee spokesman, said in a statement, “We settled aging and silly complaints from the 2016 election about ‘purpose descriptions’ in our F.E.C. report.”So-called conciliation agreements attached to the letter sent to Mr. Backer showed that the campaign and the party disagreed that they had inaccurately described the purpose of their spending. They argued that the research Perkins Coie had commissioned was part of the legal services the law firm provided, including “in anticipation of litigation.”Nevertheless, the documents said, the campaign and the party agreed in February to pay civil penalties totaling $113,000 — $8,000 from the campaign and $105,000 from the party — to resolve the matter “expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs.” The agreements said the campaign and the party did not concede that the Federal Election Commission was correct that they probably violated campaign finance law but “will not further contest” that finding either.The commission documents said Perkins Coie — where a partner at the time, Marc Elias, was representing the Clinton campaign — paid Fusion GPS slightly more than $1 million in 2016, and the law firm was in turn paid $175,000 by the campaign and about $850,000 by the party during six weeks in July and August 2016. Campaign spending disclosure reports described most of those payments to Perkins Coie as having been for “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting.”The Washington Examiner earlier reported on the commission’s letter to Mr. Backer.The Steele dossier was a set of reports written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research firm was a subcontractor that Fusion GPS hired to look into Mr. Trump’s purported links to Russia. The reports cited unnamed sources who claimed that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.In addition to giving his reports to Perkins Coie, Mr. Steele shared some with the F.B.I. and reporters. The F.B.I. — which had opened its investigation into Russia’s election interference operation and links to the Trump campaign on other grounds — used part of the dossier in applications to wiretap a Trump associate. BuzzFeed published the dossier in January 2017, heightening suspicion about Mr. Trump and Russia.It has become clear that the dossier’s sourcing was thin. No corroborating evidence emerged in the intervening years to support many of its claims, such as the purported sex tape, and investigators determined that one key allegation — that a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Michael D. Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.The primary source of information in the dossier was Igor Danchenko, a researcher hired by Mr. Steele to canvass for information about Mr. Trump and Russia from people he knew, including in Europe and Russia.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. in 2017 that he thought the tenor of the dossier was more conclusive than was justified. He portrayed the story of the blackmail tape as speculation that he was unable to confirm; a key source had called him without identifying himself, he said, adding that he had guessed at the source’s identity.Last year, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the Russia inquiry, John H. Durham, indicted Mr. Danchenko on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of his sources.At the same time the Federal Election Commission decided that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party had probably violated campaign finance law, the agency dismissed related complaints against Mr. Elias, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS and Mr. Steele, according to the commission’s letter to Mr. Backer and a letter to Mr. Elias that was obtained by The New York Times. 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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      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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      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

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      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More