Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said in a 2017 interview released on Thursday that the FBI was unable to “prove the accuracy of all of the information” contained in the Steele dossier—the material that the FBI used to help obtain surveillance warrants to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“What is the most damning or important piece of evidence in the [Steele] dossier that you now know is true?” McCabe was asked.
“Well, as I tried to explain before, there is a lot of information in the Steele reporting. We have not been able to prove the accuracy of all the information,” McCabe replied.
The interviewer later asked McCabe about an FBI assessment regarding Carter Page—the details of which was redacted in the interview—how McCabe knew that the assessment was true.
“How do you know that that’s true?” the interviewer asked, a short while later adding, “You don’t know if it’s true or not?”
“That’s correct,” replied McCabe. McCabe said that the assessment was “an educated guess based on evidence.”
McCabe also told the interviewer, “I will not sit here and tell you that I can vouch for all the content of the Steele reporting. We can’t prove all of it. But nevertheless, with appropriate caveats ... I think it was appropriate to put it in the FISA package.”
Information from the Steele dossier formed part of the evidence that the FBI used to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to surveil Page—the surveillance formed part of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s election campaign. The FISA warrant application described Page as an agent of Russia.
The dossier, which comprises several reports compiled by Fusion GPS and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, claimed that the Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm funded the dossier.
McCabe was also asked in his December 2017 interview about Comey’s remarks regarding the dossier.
“What do you think when Mr. Comey describes the [Steele] dossier as unsubstantiated? How do you respond to that?” the interviewer asked.
“I can’t speak to why he referred to it that way,” McCabe said.
“Director Comey was very familiar with the Steele reporting and was involved in not only our assessments that led to its inclusion in the FISA package, but also how we broached the issue of including it in the Intelligence Community assessment,” McCabe also said.
“Why would he describe it [the Steele dossier] as unverified?” the interviewer asked, to which McCabe responded, “I don’t know.”
“What I understand by verified is we then try to replicate the source information, so that it becomes FBI investigation and our conclusions rather than a reliable source’s. That’s what I understand it, the difference to be,” Comey said at the time.
“And that work wasn’t completed by the time I left in May of 2017, to my knowledge.”
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