Steele Dossier background written by political historian and Boston College history professor....

Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to make observations about contemporary American politics. She is the author, most recently, of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

Biography
I'm from rural Maine, was educated at Exeter and Harvard, and am now a professor of history at Boston College. I write books about the American past, and write articles about modern politics. The past informs my work on the present, not the other way around.


I have given up trying to engage folks brainwashed by Fox News (which by its own programming is labeled "entertainment" rather than news) and have simply begun banning those who post Fox propaganda here. But because the same disinformation came up here again and again yesterday, let me explain how and why the FBI began the investigation that is roiling our politics.

There are two separate 2016 investigations that came together, and people tend to confuse them. First of all, there is the so-called Steele Dossier, which pro-Trump factions insist Hillary Clinton initiated and which then became an FBI investigation. (This is not what happened.) And then there is the FBI investigation that indirectly led to the appointment Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The origins of the Steele Dossier are as follows: In 2015, The Free Beacon, a conservative Washington, D.C. website run by Matthew Continetti, the son-in-law of William Kristol and part of the Never-Trump faction, hired a research firm called Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Republican candidates, including Mr. Trump. (This is normal in political campaigns, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. If your candidate has serious skeletons, you want to know it before they get the presidential nomination, because that dirt could destroy them in the general election.) In April 2016, the Clinton campaign also retained Fusion GPS to look into Trump's skeletons, and in June, Fusion GPS gave the job to a well-respected former British intelligence agent who specialized in Russia, Christopher Steele. Steele did not know who the client was. Then, in May 2016, when it looked like Trump had clinched the nomination, The Free Beacon dropped the investigation. So far, nothing was unusual for a presidential election year.

But Steele's sources produced information that concerned him enough not simply to give it to Fusion GPS, but also to take it to American and British intelligence officers. What he turned up made him worry that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia and thus was a national security threat. The FBI was slow to react, but by at least late August 2016 was communicating with Steele. Fusion GPS held meetings in late summer 2016 between Steele and reporters to tell them what he had found. None of them reported on the explosive findings.

But... although Steele did begin to offer information for FBI investigators to follow, his dossier was not what launched the FBI investigation.

The spark for that was a young, unnoticed operative, George Papadopoulos, who brought to prominence something that had been going on for the previous three years. Papadopoulos quite surprisingly became a senior advisor to Trump's campaign in March 2016, apparently because of his Russian connections. In May, after the emails of the Democratic National Committee were hacked, Papadopoulos bragged to the Greek Foreign Minister that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. In July, an Australian official told the FBI what Papadopoulos had been saying, and at the end of July 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence operation to investigate whether or not Russia was interfering in the 2016 election. Papadopoulos, not the Steele Dossier, was the spark for the FBI investigation.

The FBI is charge with protecting America, and its officers had reason to worry when it heard what Papadopoulos was saying. It had been following Carter Page, one of Trump's advisors, since 2013, when the FBI caught a Russian spy on tape talking about recruiting Page as an asset. Then, in December 2015, Michael Flynn, another Trump advisor who would briefly become Trump's National Security Advisor, sat next to Russian leader Vladimir Putin at a gala, an attendance for which he was paid $45,000. More and more contacts mounted between members of the Trump campaign and Russian agents in 2016-- detailed in two articles I'll link in the notes-- and by August 2016, FBI operatives were talking with Steele and hearing what his Russian contacts were saying.

Part 2 in first reply....