

We asked Ratcliffe’s office how he could claim that “a fake, phony dossier … started all of this.” His office responded: “Very easily. “So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.” arranged with what he was told was a “Russian government attorney” offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton. Gowdy mentioned other incidents that had nothing to do with the dossier, including Papadopoulos’ contacts with the professor and the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr. “I actually don’t think it has any impact on the Russia probe,” Gowdy said on Feb. Trey Gowdy, also a member of the intelligence committee, said the dossier didn’t have any effect on the Russia investigation. But one of the few points of agreement is that the FBI investigation began with information on Papadopoulos.Īfter the GOP memo was released, Republican Rep. The two sides disagree about how essential the dossier was to the FISA court application to monitor Page. 24, 2018, that the FBI investigation started “more than seven weeks” before the FBI received Steele’s intelligence reporting in mid-September of that year. The Democrats on the House intelligence committee agreed with that, saying in a memo released Feb. But it said the “Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016.” 2, 2018, by the Republicans on the House intelligence committee raised concerns about the use of the dossier in an application from the DOJ and FBI under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct electronic surveillance on Carter Page, another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. While he was a Trump campaign adviser, Papadopoulos met with a professor with connections to Russian government officials who told him “about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails,'” and he tried to arrange a meeting between the Russian government and the campaign, the DOJ’s statement of the offense said.Ī memo released Feb. Papadopoulos had contacts with Russian intermediaries during the campaign, according to the Justice Department, and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts.

But we do know, according to Barr’s summary of it, that Mueller’s report said: “he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”īarr wrote in his memo that “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”īut Ratcliffe is wrong to say the dossier “started all of this.” Competing memos from the Republicans and the Democrats on the House intelligence committee both say that information about George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, had prompted the FBI investigation in July 2016. For now, Mueller’s report remains confidential. Mueller III said, or didn’t say, about the dossier in his report to Barr. We don’t know what special counsel Robert S. (See “ Q&A on the Nunes Memo” for more information.) Steele was hired by the research firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by a law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It alleged the Russian government had compromising information on then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Russian dossier case series#
The “dossier” is a series of memos compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele on s upposed contacts between Russian officials and members of the Trump campaign. … It wasn’t real and now Bob Mueller says it wasn’t real. Ratcliffe, March 25: That this was a fake, phony dossier that started all of this, funded by the Democrats. So I wasn’t surprised at all at the findings” of the special counsel investigation, as revealed in a four-page memo on March 24 by Attorney General William P. Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican who is a member of the House intelligence committee, said in the interview on Fox Business Network that “ I had seen every classified document that any member of Congress was allowed to see. John Ratcliffe said that what “started all of this” was “a fake, phony dossier.” But a House Republican intelligence committee memo said it was information about a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser that sparked the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election. In an interview about the special counsel’s report, Rep.
