Inspector General Michael Horowitz discovered that FBI agents shared extensive classified materials with former British spy Christopher Steele, despite knowing the Democratic National Committee was paying Steele and that Hillary Clinton herself was aware of Steele’s research, according to a new report by Eric Felten at RealClearInvestigations.
FBI agents met with Steele in Rome just a month before the 2016 election, where they gave him a “general overview” of Crossfire Hurricane as well as details of the cases against Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. In addition to the intel, Steele was compensated $15,000 by the FBI for attending the three-hour meeting.
Buried in IG Report: How an FBI Team in Rome Gave Steele Highly Guarded Secrets
By Eric Felten
(RealClearInvestigations) – A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.
What’s more, Steele, the former British spy who compiled the “dossier” of conspiracy theories for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was promised $15,000 to attend the briefing by FBI agents eager to maintain his cooperation in their Trump-Russia collusion investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.
That investigation was so closely guarded that only a handful of top officials and agents at the FBI were allowed to know about it.
The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI agents in early October 2016 shared with Steele extensive classified materials, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media. The secrets included foreign intelligence information still considered so sensitive that the IG’s report refers to it even now only as coming from a “Friendly Foreign Government.” In fact, this is a reference to Australia. That country’s ambassador to Britain sent the United States a tip about loose talk by junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. The FBI has described that as the predicate for its Trump-Russia investigation.
The IG report also discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, and that Steele informed the FBI that the “candidate” – Clinton herself – knew about Steele’s work. Steele did not keep to himself the classified material he had learned from the FBI. Shortly after the Rome meeting, Steele briefed Simpson on what the FBI had disclosed to him.
The FBI’s disclosures to Steele — described on pages 114-115 and in footnote 513, and supported on pages 386-390 and footnotes 252 and 513, deep in Horowitz’s report – were violations of laws governing the handling of classified material, according to the Inspector General and experts in national security law who spoke with RealClearInvestigations.
The Department of Justice did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations. Steele and Simpson did not respond to interview requests placed with their offices…
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