The 'Trump Dossier' Is Out

What the FBI wants us to see, anyway
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 15, 2018 12:39 PM CST
The 'Trump Dossier' Is Released
In this June 8, 2017, file photo, former FBI director James Comey testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington.   (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Talk about redacted: The FBI released Friday a limited version of a contentious memo about President Trump's possible Russia connections, Politico reports. Former FBI Director James Comey used the memo—now known as the "Trump dossier"—to brief Trump on the issue. "An FBI source ... volunteered highly politically sensitive information ... on Russian influence efforts aimed at the US presidential election," reads the two-page document. Gathered by former British agent Christopher Steele, the memo has triggered several rounds of political fisticuffs over Russia's influence on the 2016 election. "The source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years," the document goes on, without naming Steele.

"The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past," per the memo. "The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI." And that, folks, is all we get to see. However redacted, the memo may well spark another debate over who funded the dossier (a research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign) and whether it played too big a role in a FISA surveillance warrant on ex-Trump adviser Carter Page, says CNN. Politico and a public records advocacy group called the James Madison Project had sued for the memo's release. (The FBI also released its top-secret wiretapping request in the Russia probe.)

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