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On October 3, 2016, Michael Gaeta hosted a meeting in Rome in order to introduce himself and Christopher Steele to several members of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team. Gaeta had served as the FBI's Handling Agent for Steele since 2011 and would continue to do so.
In 2016, Gaeta and Steele were focused on counter-intelligence collections. Although Gaeta officially was working an assistant to the FBI's Legal Attaché (Legat) in Rome, I think that job was a cover. Actually, Gaeta was working directly for the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
Three Crossfire Hurricane team members attended the Rome meeting (Horowitz, page 108):
1) an Acting Section Chief from FBI's Counterintelligence Division ("Acting Section Chief 1")I think those three Crossfire Hurricane team members were the officials marked in the below diagram (Horowitz, page 81).
2) "Case Agent 2"
3) "Supervisory Intel Analyst"
Click on the image to enlarge it.
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The three team members at the Rome meeting thought that Steele had provided only six reports to the FBI. In fact, however, Steele already had provided at least 34 reports during the year 2016.
One major purpose of the Rome meeting was to discuss with Steele whether he might eventually quit the private company Fusion GPS in order to write counter-intelligence reports exclusively for the FBI.
This switch would be complicated.
Steele would have to identify his relevant sources to the FBI.These issues were discussed but not decided at the Rome meeting.
Steele would have to sever his contract with Fusion GPS.
The FBI would have to pay Steele more money.
Steele would have to obey the FBI's rules.
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I group Steele's Dossier reports as follows:
Reports 80 to 93
On July 5, 2016, Steele gave Gaeta 14 reports. Report 80 was the Dossier's introduction, which said that Russian Intelligence had been cultivating Donald Trump for five years -- since mid-2011. Reports 81-93 were old reports, which Steele had written during the years 2011-2015, telling about that cultivation.
Gaeta immediately sent all 14 reports to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. However, Gaeta concocted a false story to deceive the Rome Legat. Gaeta pretended that he had received only Report 80 and pretended further that the routing of this one report was delayed for many weeks because of uncertainties and misunderstandings.
Report 80 was delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19 and is publicly available now. Reports 81-93 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.
According to a judgment of a British court, Steele himself has testified that he gave Gaeta more than one Dossier report on July 5 (paragraph 51(1)).
Reports 94 to 99
These reports were written in the last half of July 2016 and helped to justify the establishment of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016.
Reports 94 and 95 were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19. Reports 96, 98 and 99 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present. Report 97 was concealed for a while because it indicated that Steele was collecting information from inside Donald Trump's campaign staff, but Report 97 has become available to the public.
Reports 100 to 113
These reports were written after the establishment of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (after July 31) and before the Rome meeting (before October 3).
Reports 100, 101, 102 and 105 were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19. Reports 104 and 106 to 113 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.
According to a judgment of a British court, Steele himself has said that sometime in August he gave Gaeta all the remaining Dossier reports that he had written by that August date. (paragraph 51(2)).
According to that same judgment, Steele himself has said that he gave Report 112 (dated September 14) to Gaeta "within a few days" after September 14. (paragraph 51(4)).
Reports 114 to 129
These are old reports that Steele wrote before the year 2016. Based on the discussions at the Rome meeting, Steele thought these old reports might be valuable for the investigation. In the days following the Rome meeting, Steele gave these old reports to Gaeta, who sent them promptly (no later than October 12) to FBI Counterintelligence, which has concealed them to the present.
Reports 130 to 166
These reports were written from October 12 to December 13, 2016. Some (at least through Report 135) were written before Gaeta fired Steele at the end of October, and the rest were written after Gaeta fired Steele.
The only reports that were written before the firing and that are available to the public are Report 130 (October 12), Report 134 (October 18) and Report 135 (October 15). The rest of the reports written before the firing have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.
The only report that was written after the firing and that is available to the public is Report 166 (December 13). It's likely that, despite the firing, Steele delivered all these reports to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who delivered them to FBI Counterintelligence, which has concealed them to the present.
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Reports that have become publicly available did so because they were given by Steele to people outside of the FBI.
There is no reason to think that the Dossier reports assembled by Buzzfeed are all the Dossier reports that the FBI received.
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By October 3, Steele had written the following Dossier reports that are available to the public:
1) Report 80, dated June 20, 2016In mid-September, a decision was made that some Dossier reports should be delivered belatedly to the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters. Specifically, six Dossier reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- were delivered on September 19 (Horowitz page 100).
2) Report 86, dated July 26, 2015 (twenty-fifteen)
3) Report 94, dated July 19, 2016
4) Report 95, undated, but apparently written in late-July 2016
5) Report 97, dated July 30, 2016
6) Report 100, dated August 5, 2016
7) Report 101, dated August 10, 2016
8) Report 102, dated August 10, 2016
9) Report 105, dated August 22, 2016
10) Report 111, dated September 14, 2016
11) Report 112, dated September 14, 2016
12) Report 113, dated September 14, 2016
The Horowitz report specifies (pages 103-104, footnote 231) that Steele did not furnish several reports to the FBI before the October 3 Rome meeting: 97, 105, 112 and 113. The Horowitz report explains:
.... the FBI was unaware at the time that Steele had not made available to the FBI all of the reports he prepared as of mid-September concerning Russia. .... These and other reports were provided to the FBI in November and December 2016 by a journalist, Senator John McCain, and Ohr. When we [Horowitz's inspectors] asked Steele why he failed to provide all of his then-existing reports to the FBI, he could not provide us with an explanation and said that he should have given them to the FBI at the time.Of course -- in my opinion -- Steele actually had given those four reports to Gaeta before the Rome meeting, and Gaeta had sent them directly to the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters. When Steele was asked by Horowitz's inspectors about missing reports, Steele "could not provide us with an explanation". Steele was surprised by the question -- and that is why he could not provide an explanation -- because he had provided all those reports to Gaeta promptly after he had written them.
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The Horowitz does not explain Dossier Reports 96, 98, 99 and 111.
Those four reports are not listed in the six reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- that were delivered to the Crossfire Headquarters team on September 19.When the Horowitz inspectors wrote about their asking Steele "why he failed to provide all of his then-existing reports to the FBI", why are Reports 96, 98, 99 and 111 missing from that account?
Those four reports are not listed in the four reports -- 97, 105, 112 and 113 -- that the Horowitz inspectors asked Steele about.
No information about Reports 96, 98 and 99 is available to the public.
Report 111 is based on information from "a senior official of the Russian Presidential Administration (PA)". This particular report was particularly troublesome for the CIA, which indeed collected information secretly from such a PA official -- Yuri Ushakov, whose assistant Oleg Smolenkov secretly was reporting Ushakov's remarks to the CIA. I wrote about this arrangement in an earlier blog article titled The CIA's Concerns About Steele's Dossier.
I speculate that the CIA asked Horowitz to avoid discussion of Steele's Report 111. Horowitz claims absurdly that Steele never provided Report 111 to the FBI, which obtained that report only after the November 2016 Presidential election, belatedly from a magazine reporter (page 175).
I speculate that Dossier Reports 96, 98 and 99 likewise were based on the PA official and therefore could not -- at the CIA's request -- be mentioned by Horowitz.
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Continued in Part 3
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