The Steele dossier was a report compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by Democrats that included salacious allegations about Trump’s conduct in Russia and allegations about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.ĭocuments have shown the FBI invested significant resources attempting to corroborate the dossier and relied substantially on it to obtain surveillance warrants targeting the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.īut since its publication, core aspects of the dossier have been exposed as unsupported and unproven rumors. The documents have not yet been made public and an FEC spokeswoman, Judith Ingram, said the FEC had 30 days after parties are notified about enforcement matters to release them. The Clinton campaign agreed to a civil penalty of $8,000 and the DNC $105,000, according to a pair of conciliatory agreements that were attached to the letter sent to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. The Clinton campaign and DNC had argued that the payments had been described accurately, but agreed, according to the documents, to settle without conceding to avoid further legal costs. “By intentionally obscuring their payments through Perkins Coie and failing to publicly disclose the true purpose of those payments” the campaign and DNC “were able to avoid publicly reporting on their statutorily required FEC disclosure forms the fact that they were paying Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump with the intent of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” the initial complaint had read. But on FEC forms, the Clinton campaign classified the spending as legal services. The identity of the original client has not been revealed.The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm, to conduct opposition research on Republican candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. When Fusion approached Elias, it had already been doing research work on Trump for a client during the GOP primary. The deal began in the spring of 2016, when the firm was approached by Fusion GPS, the political research firm behind the dossier, and lasted until right before Election Day, according to the person. The NSA found the same with “moderate” confidence.Ī person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential client matters, said the funding arrangement was brokered by Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and his law firm of Perkins Coie.
The FBI and the CIA have said with high confidence that the effort was aimed at hurting Clinton’s candidacy and helping Trump. Trump also has challenged the findings of the FBI, NSA and CIA that Russia waged a large-scale influence campaign to interfere in the election. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the document as false and in recent days has questioned whether Democrats or the FBI had helped fund it. It contends that Russia was engaged in a long-standing effort to aid Trump and had amassed compromising information about the Republican. The dossier circulated in Washington last year and was turned over to the FBI for its review.
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