The ex-British intelligence officer who created the uncorroborated and salacious dossier, paid for by Democrats, that alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, will not cooperate with a Department of Justice review of how the collusion investigation began.
Christopher Steele was hired by Fusion GPS on behalf of the law firm Perkins Coie, which was in turn hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to create the dossier. Steele’s dossier contained some information that should have been easily verifiable, such as whether former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of this. That, among other things, called into question Steele’s entire dossier.
Steele cooperated fully with the FBI when he was providing them his information. He leaked his findings to various news outlets as well, which eventually ran with the unverified claims because they hurt Trump. Steele also cooperated with Mueller’s investigation.
But now that the origins of the investigation, which cited the Steele dossier as evidence to obtain warrants against various Trump campaign officials, are under investigation, Steele does not want to cooperate, according to Reuters. Reuters, speaking to a “source close to Steele’s London-based private investigation firm, Orbis Business Intelligence,” reported that Steele would not answer questions from prosecutor John Durham, who was named by Attorney General William Barr to handle the investigation.
Just a reminder: Reuters was one of the outlets Steele himself briefed on his dossier. This was reported by Reuters’ investigative correspondent Mark Hosenball, who also write the article now citing a “source close” to Steele’s company.
This same source also told the media outlet that Steele “might” cooperate with a parallel investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General. This source also described Steele’s cooperation with the Mueller investigation, including the two interviews he gave to Mueller’s team and the written testimony he gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year.
The “might” in the Reuters article is heavy. In April, Politico’s Natasha Bertrand reported that Steele “declined to be interviewed by the inspector general, citing, among other things, the potential impropriety of his involvement in an internal Justice Department investigation as a foreign national and former British intelligence agent.”
So, somebody’s sources are wrong, unless Steele has changed his mind about cooperating with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, it is expected that Horowitz and his investigation will be criticized heavily by the media, which went all-in on the Steele dossier and Mueller investigation, only for the report to come up empty. The Wire also reported that media outlets are cautiously embracing the investigation by Durham, the prosecutor hired by AG Barr to investigate the origins of the Mueller probe. CNN headlined an article suggesting his reputation as an “apolitical” prosecutor was “on the line” – meaning if he didn’t find what the media wanted him to find he would be labeled a partisan despite everything he had done in this past.
In the end, both of these investigations will end up smeared in the media in part because they will not have questioned Steele.