But there were two problems with Steele’s credibility, according to the referral. The first was the lack of corroborating evidence. The other was convincing evidence that Steele lied to the FBI.
The credibility issue focused on whether Steele shared his dossier allegations with the press. When, in the late summer of 2016, the FBI asked Steele to join the Trump investigation — an extraordinary move, given that it was the middle of a presidential campaign and Steele was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign — one obvious condition was that Steele not share his information with the press.
Steele apparently told the FBI he had shared his information with only two parties — the FBI and his client, which was the opposition research fund Fusion GPS, working for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. But the Yahoo article “contained some of the same dossier information about Mr. Page compiled by Mr. Steele on which the FBI relied in its application,” Grassley and Graham wrote. Wouldn’t that lead a reasonable observer to suspect Steele had talked to Yahoo?
Steele denied to the FBI that he had done that. In turn, the FBI denied to the FISA court that Steele had talked to Yahoo. Grassley and Graham offered a quote from the actual application, in which the FBI wrote, “Given that the information contained in the September 23rd news article generally matches the information about Page the [Steele] discovered doing his/her research, [redacted portion] The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press.”
The use of the word “directly” suggested that perhaps the client had given Steele’s information to Yahoo. But in fact, Steele himself had directly provided the information to the press. In September he personally briefed reporters from Yahoo, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the New Yorker. In October, he did it again — the Washington Post reported that Steele was “visibly agitated” in an anti-Trump fervor during his second visit to the paper.
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