Steele says he got some of the material for debunked dossier from Clinton lawyers

Washington Examiner:

British ex-spy Christopher Steele testified he met with Democratic lawyers during the 2016 presidential election, and one provided him with now-debunked claims about alleged Trump-Russia collusion as he compiled his dossier.

Steele, a former MI6 agent whose salacious and unverified dossier was used by the FBI in its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act targeting of Trump campaign associate Carter Page, discussed his meetings with two lawyers tied to Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee during a deposition in a British court in mid-March, according to a transcript obtained by the Daily Caller.

Michael Sussman and Marc Elias, two top lawyers for the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and the DNC, played an even more significant role in the Trump-Russia investigation than previously known.

Steele testified Sussman provided him with claims about Alfa Bank’s purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a late July meeting. These allegations made their way into a mid-September 2016 memo that became part of Steele’s dossier, although Steele repeatedly misspells “Alfa” as “Alpha.” Shortly after writing that memo, Steele met with Elias, who was the general counsel for Clinton’s campaign and had personally hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 on the campaign’s behalf. Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson hired Steele in June 2016. It is not known what Steele and Elias discussed at their meeting.

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For months in 2016, Steele shared with government officials the claim that an Alfa Bank server was a mode of communication for Trump-Russia collusion.

“I’m very clear is that the first person that ever mentioned the Trump server issue, Alfa server issue, was Mr. Sussman," he told Alfa Bank's lawyers in March. Steele also said, “I was given the instruction sometime after that meeting by Mr. Simpson” to look into that as part of his dossier investigation, and said the Fusion GPS co-founder's instruction “was absolutely, definitely linked to the server issue.”

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz dismissed the Alfa Bank Trump-Russia collusion claims in his December report on FISA abuse. Newly declassified footnotes also show the bureau was aware Steele’s source network might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.

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Although Steele was the source for a late September 2016 Yahoo News article on Carter Page and a late October 2016 Mother Jones piece alleging a Russian operation to cultivate Trump, Sussman is reportedly the source for news stories in 2016 about alleged secretive server communications between the Russian bank and the Trump Organization. It is not yet known how Sussman was led to these claims. Slate reported at the end of October 2016 that researchers found “a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.”

The New York Times published a piece at the start of November 2016, which stated that “FBI officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank." The report noted that “the FBI ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.”

Former FBI General Counsel James Baker testified in 2018 that Sussman, a former DOJ colleague of his, separately shared the Alfa Bank claims with him during a September 2016 meeting. And notes from Ohr’s December 2016 meeting with Simpson show the Fusion GPS co-founder said the New York Times was wrong to doubt the Alfa Bank server story.

Interviews that Sussman and Elias gave to the House Intelligence Committee are among the dozens of witness transcripts which Democratic Chairman Adam Schiff has declined to make public.

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There is more.

The sham Russian collusion hoax appears to have been manufactured by the Clinton campaign and was never based on anything beyond conjecture unsupported by the facts.  Those responsible for pushing this hoax should be brought to justice.