On Wednesday, the conservative Washington Examiner reported that Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the infamous "dossier" outlining President Donald Trump's ties to Russia, is worried the Justice Department's inspector general will "throw him under the bus" in his report on whether Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court protocol was properly followed.
The original reporting came from Matthew Rosenberg, a CNN contributor and New York Times reporter who spoke to people in Steele's orbit.
Trump and his allies have been desperate to discredit the investigation of his campaign by the FBI, and subsequently by former special counsel Robert Mueller, by arguing that the dossier was improperly used to obtain surveillance warrants.
The dossier, which was initially funded by conservative opponents of Trump during the primaries and later by the Democratic activists, has since had many of its key claims corroborated, including that the Russian military used WikiLeaks to disseminate stolen intelligence on Democrats and that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had extensive, compromising financial relationships with Ukrainian oligarchs. The key salacious claim that everyone knows about the dossier, however — that Russia has a tape of Trump with urinating hookers in a Moscow hotel room — remains unsupported by evidence.
It is unclear what the inspector general's report will reveal about the Steele dossier, and Steele's conduct generally. But the idea that the dossier was the sole basis for the investigation of Trump has been repeatedly disproven. The FBI also had other lines of evidence that Trump's campaign was being exploited by Russia, including remarks by former adviser George Papadopoulos to an Australian diplomat.
