# Steele Dossier > [!note] 📄 Non-governmental report > Private opposition research commissioned through [[Fusion GPS]] and written by [[Christopher Steele]]. It carries no official standing; the government's assessments of it are in the [[Horowitz FISA Report]] and the [[Durham Report]]. Seventeen memos written between June and December 2016 by former MI6 officer [[Christopher Steele]] on Donald Trump's relationship with Russia — published by [[BuzzFeed]] as a 35-page document in January 2017. It is the most argued-over document of the Trump era. Its broad claim — that the Kremlin was working to elect Trump and cultivating people around him — was confirmed by U.S. intelligence, the [[Mueller Investigation]] and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Its specific allegations were almost entirely never corroborated. The first fact made it an early warning; the second made it, for the right, the founding forgery of the "Russia hoax." ## Who paid for it The research chain ran from the Clinton campaign and the DNC, through their law firm [[Perkins Coie]], to [[Fusion GPS]], which subcontracted Steele's firm Orbis in June 2016; Orbis was paid about $168,000. Fusion's earlier Trump research had been funded by the conservative [[Washington Free Beacon]], but the dossier itself belongs only to the Democratic-funded phase. In 2022 the [[Federal Election Commission]] fined the DNC and the campaign for reporting the payments as "legal services." See [[Fusion GPS]] for the full chain. ## What it alleged Steele described the memos as "raw intelligence — not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation." Their main claims: - that the Russian government was working to elect Trump and to damage Clinton; - that Trump's campaign and Russian officials had a "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation," with [[Paul Manafort]] and [[Carter Page]] as intermediaries; - that Russian intelligence held [[Kompromat]] on Trump, including the sexual allegations tied to a 2013 stay at Moscow's Ritz-Carlton; - that Carter Page had discussed a brokerage fee on a stake in [[Rosneft]] with [[Igor Sechin]]'s side in exchange for lifting sanctions; - that [[Michael Cohen]] had met Russian officials in Prague in 2016. ## How it moved | Date | Event | |---|---| | July 5, 2016 | Steele gives the first memo to FBI agent Michael Gaeta in London | | Sept 19, 2016 | Six memos reach the FBI's [[Crossfire Hurricane]] team — seven weeks after the investigation had been opened on the separate Papadopoulos tip | | Oct 2016 | The FBI cites the dossier in its first surveillance application on Carter Page to the [[FISA Court]] | | Dec 9, 2016 | Sen. [[John McCain]] hands a copy to FBI Director [[James Comey]] | | Jan 6, 2017 | Comey privately tells President-elect Trump about the most salacious allegations | | Jan 10, 2017 | BuzzFeed publishes the full dossier, unverified | | Jan 2017 | The FBI interviews Steele's main collector, [[Igor Danchenko]], who describes his sources as friends he talked with and his material as closer to rumor than verified intelligence | ## What the investigations found **The inspector general (Dec 9, 2019).** [[Michael Horowitz]] found Crossfire Hurricane was properly opened and found no documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias drove the decision. But he found the dossier played a "central and essential role" in the Carter Page surveillance applications, which contained **17 significant errors and omissions**. His footnotes record that in January and February 2017 U.S. intelligence reports warned that some dossier claims — including those about Cohen — were likely Russian disinformation, and that the FBI renewed the Page surveillance anyway. See [[Release the Memo]] for the House Republican version of this critique, which came first. **Durham (May 15, 2023).** [[John Durham]]'s final report concluded "the FBI was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation contained in the Steele Reports," and faulted the Bureau for how it used them. His prosecutions fared worse than his report: Perkins Coie lawyer [[Michael Sussmann]] was acquitted in May 2022, and Danchenko was acquitted on all four counts on October 18, 2022. **Corroborated vs. not.** | Broadly confirmed by other investigations | Never corroborated or contradicted | |---|---| | Russia interfered to help Trump and hurt Clinton | The kompromat tape | | Putin ordered the influence campaign | Cohen in Prague (Cohen has always denied it; Steele still stood by it in 2021) | | Russia cultivated Trump associates, who had undisclosed contacts with Russians | The Page–Rosneft brokerage offer | | | A "well-developed conspiracy" between the campaign and the Kremlin (Mueller did not establish one) | ## Lawsuits - **Gubarev v. BuzzFeed** — a Russian tech executive named in the dossier sued BuzzFeed; the court held publication was protected as a fair report (Dec 2018). - **Aven and Fridman v. Orbis** — the [[Alfa Bank]] owners won £18,000 each in London in July 2020 under data-protection law. - **Trump v. Orbis** — dismissed by the High Court on February 1, 2024 as "bound to fail"; Trump was ordered to pay about £300,000 in costs. ## Afterlife The dossier's second life is as policy. Trump's March 2025 executive order against Perkins Coie accuses the firm of hiring Fusion GPS "to manufacture a false 'dossier' designed to steal an election." The Justice Department's [[Grand Conspiracy Probe]] of 2025–26 treats the dossier and the FBI's use of it as the start of a conspiracy against Trump. And Steele himself keeps the document alive: in 2026 he said [[Jeffrey Epstein]]'s Russian handlers "likely" held compromising material on Trump. > [!note] How to cite it in this vault > The dossier is evidence of **what a paid opposition researcher was told in 2016**, not of what happened. Cite it for the former; cite the [[Mueller Report]], the Senate Intelligence Committee and court records for the latter. ## See Also - [[Christopher Steele]] · [[Igor Danchenko]] · [[Fusion GPS]] · [[Perkins Coie]] · [[Glenn Simpson]] - [[Crossfire Hurricane]] · [[Carter Page]] · [[FISA Court]] · [[Release the Memo]] · [[Kash Patel]] - [[Mueller Investigation]] · [[John Durham]] · [[Michael Horowitz]] · [[Grand Conspiracy Probe]] - [[Kompromat]] · [[Trump-Russia Arc Timeline]]