Former President Donald Trump slammed the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) for pushing for arrests to be made following the controversial Steele dossier report. The 2017 report had at the time alleged that there were ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The Steele dossier is an unverified report created by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 election, which alleges that Russia had been connected to Trump for years. According to the dossier, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chief and many other campaign figures had worked along with the Kremlin in order to come up with information against Hillary Clinton, who was the 2016 Democratic candidate.
Special Counsel John Durham has been investigating the origins of the FBI investigation into the allegations about Trump’s ties with Russia for four years. As part of the investigation, he questioned FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten in October 2022 trying to find out whether Steele had provided anything in return for the information exchange. In response, Auten had stated that Steele had been offered up to $1 million by the agency.
In his final report, released on May 12th, Durham concluded that at the time of the FBI opening a case to investigate the allegations, there was not enough evidence to support opening a probe. This has widely been perceived as a victory for Trump who has long criticized Operation Crossfire Hurricane, as the FBI’s probe was called. Durham, in his final assessment, agreed with Trump that there was no solid intelligence to warrant a search and that the Department of Justice and FBI has not upheld their mission with this investigation which was based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.”
