'An unknown entity — its identity is still redacted — assessed that “it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations,” the footnote stated.

The footnote refers to a piece of information given to the FBI in 2017 “outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen.”

One footnote refers to information that a Russian operative had infiltrated Steele’s network of informants.

“An individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [redacted] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 are false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltrating a source into the network’ of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities,” one footnote reads.

One FBI unit had concerns about Steele’s contacts with Russian oligarchs, but those did not make their way to the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team.

“Steele’s frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit,” one footnote stated.

Steele had previously worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some lawmakers have openly asked whether Deripaska somehow fed inaccurate information to Steele.

The footnotes indicated that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, which led the Trump probe, received information about the potential Russian disinformation campaign.

“We identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [redacted] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting,” one footnote stated.

Investigators received information in early October 2016 that a purported sub-source for the dossier was “rumored” to be a Russian intelligence agent, according to another footnote.

“According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS. The document described reporting [redacted] that Person 1 ‘was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.'”

FBI investigators told the IG they would have wanted to know earlier about the information regarding Steele, the footnotes stated.

An FBI intelligence analyst and supervisory agent told the IG that they did not recall reviewing Steele’s internal FBI source filings which document “frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs in 2015.”

The Crossfire Hurricane team did not review Steele’s source file until Nov. 18, 2016, nearly a month after the FBI obtained its first surveillance warrant against Steele.

The supervisory special agent who oversaw the Crossfire Hurricane investigation told the IG that he was unaware of those concerns, but said he would have found the information useful “and would have wanted to know about it while supervising the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation,” said Grassley and Johnson. “The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative.”

Lawmakers and other government officials have speculated for years that Russian disinformation was fed to Steele. That theory has gained traction in the three years since BuzzFeed News published Steele’s report.

Fiona Hill, who served as a top Russia expert in the Trump White House, testified on Oct. 14, 2019, at the Trump impeachment hearings that she believed that Steele published Russian disinformation.'
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/10/fbi-russian-disinformation-steele-dossier-trump/