Republican Senators Urge Probe Into 'Trump Dossier' Author

WASHINGTON, DC — Republican senators are urging the Justice Department to investigate Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent and author of the famous dossier alleging extensive ties between President Trump and the Russian government. The senators, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, say they have reason to believe Steel deliberately misled investigators about his communication with media outlets.

"We are respectfully referring Mr. Steel to you for investigation of potential violations of 18 U.S.C § 1001, for statements the committee has reason to believe Mr. Steel made regarding his distribution of information contained in the dossier," wrote Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham in a letter to the Justice Department.

These are the first charges to be suggested by congressional investigators out of the investigations into election meddling.

Many Republicans and defenders of the president — including Trump himself — have accused Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, of "colluding" with Russians, paying their sources for fake information and inappropriately working with the FBI to spy on the campaign. Funding for Fusion GPS's investigations originally came from the conservative paper The Washington Free Beacon, and then later the Clinton campaign. Some claimed that the dossier was the origin of the FBI's investigation, since taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

However, recent reporting in The New York Times suggest that it was a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that first led the FBI to investigate the president's ties to the Kremlin.

In a recent op-ed, the founders of Fusion GPS said that they were shocked by what Steele discovered in his research. They say the dossier was turned over to the FBI and later Sen. John McCain on Steele's advice. They also add they did not give it to BuzzFeed, who first made the document public when they published it in its entirety in January 2017.

“After a year of investigations into Donald Trump's ties to Russia, the only person Republicans seek to accuse of wrongdoing is one who reported on these matters to law enforcement in the first place,’’ Joshua Levy, a lawyer for Fusion GPS, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Publicizing a criminal referral based on classified information raises serious questions about whether this letter is nothing more than another attempt to discredit government sources, in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation.

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