What people forget most about the Steele Dossier is that it didn't even begin with him at all. It began with George Papadopolous back in 2016. Here's an excerpt of how it all really got going:
The FBI’s investigation originated with George Papadopoulos, not Christopher Steele
We’ve known since December 2017 that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began in July 2016 —
months before the FBI was even alerted to the existence of the Steele dossier.
The inciting incident, according to
Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo at the New York Times, had to do with WikiLeaks, which published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in July 2016. Those emails prompted Australia’s top diplomat in Britain to inform his American counterparts about a conversation he had two months earlier with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
During a night of heavy drinking in London, Papadopoulos bragged to the Australian about his knowledge that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign,” as
the Times put it. Papadopoulos has since agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation and was
sentenced to just 14 days in jail, even though Mueller’s team in a court filing said he “did not provide ‘substantial assistance.’”
You don’t have to take the Times’s word for it. Even the so-called “
Nunes memo,” prepared by then-House Intelligence Committee chair and staunch Trump ally Devin Nunes (R-CA) and released about a year ago, acknowledges that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign was “
triggered” by evidence presented to American officials about Papadopoulos having secretive contacts with Kremlin agents when it was released about a year ago.
So, even Nunes, the most GOP of GOP'ers, knows for a fact that all of it is true.
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