Overview
- Senior officials flagged the dossier’s sourcing as “extremely sketchy” and said it failed to meet standard intelligence tradecraft requirements.
- Messages reveal that the dossier relied on sources unknown to the FBI and was only minimally corroborated by subsequent investigations.
- FBI leaders James Comey, Bill Priestap and Peter Strzok pressed to include the dossier in the main body of the 2017 assessment despite internal objections.
- The Steele dossier was ultimately confined to an appendix and leaked to CNN days before the Trump inauguration.
- These disclosures follow a declassified CIA lessons-learned review and coincide with active FBI criminal probes into senior agency leadership.