“New Details Hint at Risk of Russian Misinformation in Dossier”

NYT:

The Trump administration has declassified several footnotes from a report about the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia investigation, providing details hinting anew at the possibility that Russia may have sown disinformation in a dossier used to investigate a former Trump campaign aide.

The newly disclosed information consists of previously blacked-out words in more than three dozen footnotes from a lengthy report on the investigation by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, that was made public in December. Several were disclosed Friday and the rest were sent to lawmakers on Tuesday….

The report’s newly disclosed footnotes add context to what prompted some of the worries and rounds of internal discussion among law enforcement officials.

In June 2017, for example — the month of the final wiretap renewal — an American intelligence agency received a report that indicated that two people affiliated with a Russian intelligence service were “aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.”

The footnotes also said an F.B.I. analyst told the inspector general he was aware of those reports but “had no information as of June 2017 that Steele’s election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised.”

In addition, the newly revealed footnotes show that the F.B.I. team received three reports in 2017 raising the possibility that one of the sources for the Steele dossier was potentially influenced by a “Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”

One source, whose identity remained redacted, offered two of those warnings, including casting doubt on material in the Steele dossier about Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer. The report did not say what was wrong, but the dossier claimed that Mr. Cohen had met with Russian intelligence officials in Prague, which appears to be false.

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