Declassified: Intelligence community assessment annex shows ‘limited corroboration’ of Steele dossier

Wa Ex:

The annex to the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference containing allegations from British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was declassified Thursday, revealing the U.S. government claimed to have “only limited corroboration” of the former MI6 agent’s claims.

The two-page annex, appended to the January 2017 conclusion by the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election to help then-candidate Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, was declassified by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and obtained by the Washington Examiner. Both fired FBI Director James Comey and fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had unsuccessfully pushed to include Steele’s unverified research in the official public assessment, according to a Justice Department watchdog report.

“An FBI source using both identified and unidentified sub sources volunteered highly politically sensitive information from the summer to the full of 2016 on Russian influence efforts aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” the annex stated. “We have only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.”

The declassified annex said that “some of the FBI source’s reporting is consistent with the judgments in this assessment.” The annex was partly declassified through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2018, but the judgments about the dossier’s veracity haven’t been visible to the public until now. more