FBI INVESTIGATING ANTIFA FOR PLOTTING TO BUY GUNS FROM CARTEL FOR ‘ARMED REBELLION’

The FBI is investigating anti-fascist activists for an alleged plot to buy guns from a Mexican cartel in order to “stage an armed rebellion” at the southern border, according to an unclassified document obtained by The Chicago Tribune.

The FBI document, from December of 2018, warns of militant antifa activists planning to “disrupt security operations” at the U.S.-Mexico border. The group allegedly planned to buy guns from a Mexican cartel associate known as Cobra Commander, in order to “stage an armed rebellion at the border.”

The source who provided it to the San Diego Tribune asked the outlet not to publish the six-page document because the investigation is ongoing, and the outlet cited two additional law enforcement officials who confirmed the news. The FBI has warned dozens of law enforcement agencies in both Mexico and the United States of the alleged plot.

Two of the men named in the report told the San Diego Tribune the allegations are absurd.

“It doesn’t make any sense that someone from the United States would purchase guns in Mexico,” Ivan Reibeling, the man known as Cobra Commander, told the outlet. “And the Hondurans certainly didn’t bring money to buy guns. It doesn’t make any sense; in fact it’s extremely absurd to say the Hondurans wanted to attack the United States at the border.

The FBI sent the report marked “priority” to agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the CIA and the National Security Administration.

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TRUMP ‘OUTS’ JUDGE NAPOLITANO, SAYS HE CAME ASKING FOR SCOTUS NOD

President Donald Trump tweeted after Saturday’s rally in Wisconsin an attack on Judge Andrew Napolitano, claiming the judge had come to him privately to ask for a Supreme Court nomination.

“Thank you to brilliant and highly respected attorney Alan Dershowitz for destroying the very dumb legal argument of ‘Judge’ Andrew Napolitano….” Trump began, following his praise of Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz with an immediate pivot to an attack on Napolitano.

“….Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good ‘pal’ of low ratings Shepard Smith,” the president concluded.

Trump appeared to be referring to the fallout from the recently-released Mueller report, which Napolitano has argued on his Fox News Digital show “Judge Napolitano’s Chambers” stands as proof that the president obstructed justice.

“Prosecutors prosecute people who interfere with government functions and that’s what the president did by obstruction, where is this going to end? I don’t know, but I am disappointed in the behavior of the president,” Napolitano said, calling that behavior “immoral,” “criminal,” “defenseless” and “condemnable.”

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TRUMP SAYS HE WILL DECLASSIFY FBI’S RUSSIA PROBE DOCUMENTS, ‘AND MUCH MORE’

President Donald Trump committed Thursday to declassifying a slew of records related to the Russia probe “and much more.”

Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he was “glad” he waited to declassify the documents until after the end of the special counsel’s investigation.

“I thought that maybe they would obstruct if I did it early, and I think I was right,” Trump said.

Trump has for months considered releasing portions of a classified surveillance warrant application granted in June 2017 against Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser. He has also considered declassifying FBI notes of interviews with Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official who served as dossier author Christopher Steele’s handler for months after the 2016 election.

Trump ordered all of the documents declassified on Sept. 17, 2018, but reversed course four days later. Trump said at the time that he decided not to declassify the documents after meeting with the Justice Department.

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GEORGIAN BUSINESSMAN RELEASES TEXTS WITH COHEN THAT WERE LEFT OUT OF MUELLER REPORT

• A Georgian-American businessman is calling for a retraction of a footnote in the special counsel’s report that refers to a text message exchange with Michael Cohen about a rumored Trump sex tape.
• Giorgi Rtskhiladze’s lawyer sent a letter to the attorney general claiming that the Mueller report has “glaring inaccuracies.”
• The report quoted a text message in which Rtskhiladze told Cohen he was “stopping the flow” of tapes of Trump. But in a text message left out of Mueller’s report, Rtskhiladze suggested he did not believe the rumor. 

A Georgian-American businessman is accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of publishing “glaring inaccuracies and misrepresentations” about rumors of alleged sex tapes of President Donald Trump during a visit to Moscow in 2013.

In a letter sent to Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, a lawyer for the businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, called on the Justice Department to retract a footnote in Mueller’s report mentioning an Oct. 30, 2016 text message exchange he had with attorney Michael Cohen about a rumored Trump tape.

Rtskhiladze claims that the special counsel’s report inaccurately quotes his text message with Cohen. He says that additional text messages not quoted in the report show that he was doubtful about a rumor he had heard from an associate in Moscow about the existence of a tape.

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RUSH LIMBAUGH AND TRUMP DISCUSSED ‘GOLDEN SHOWERS’ STORY DURING RECENT GOLF OUTING

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh revealed on Tuesday that he and President Trump “were laughing ourselves silly” during a golf outing this weekend over the infamous “golden showers” claim from the Steele dossier.

In an interview on Fox News, host Martha MacCallum asked Limbaugh if he got the sense during the golf session that Trump was bothered by any part of the Mueller report, which was released last Thursday.

Limbaugh said he didn’t discuss with Trump “what he thought of this and that.” But the golf group did laugh off the most salacious allegation made in the dossier: that Trump was recorded in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 with a group of Russian prostitutes. 

“At lunch after the round, he was telling Lexi about the golden showers story and how ridiculous it is, and everybody was laughing. The fact that the media believed it, the fact that people actually thought that Trump would hire some prostitutes to urinate on a bed because Obama had slept in it, we’re laughing ourselves silly over this as he told the story,” Limbaugh said.

According to the dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC, Trump watched as the Russian prostitutes urinated on each other in a “golden showers” scene.

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TRUMP FED PICK STEPHEN MOORE RESPONDS TO ‘CHARACTER ASSASSINATION’ BY CNN

Stephen Moore, one of President Donald Trump’s recent picks to join the Federal Reserve Board, slammed the media on Monday for attacks over old columns he wrote about women in sports.

CNN published an article Monday quoting four columns Moore, a former economic adviser to the Trump campaign, wrote in the early 2000s for National Review magazine. The columns included pithy jokes and commentary about banning female announcers and referees from NCAA basketball games and questioning why ESPN would ever air women’s basketball.

“How outrageous is this? This year they allowed a woman ref a men’s NCAA game. Liberals celebrate this breakthrough as a triumph for gender equity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties?”

“There’s no joy in dunking over a girl,” Moore added about women joining men’s sports. “Never mind that I can’t dunk (except on the eight-foot baskets). If I could, I wouldn’t celebrate dunking over someone named Tina.”

“This was a spoof,” Moore said in a statement to CNN about the columns. “I have a sense of humor.”

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JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SEEKS 18-MONTH PRISON SENTENCE FOR RUSSIAN AGENT MARIA BUTINA

The Justice Department recommended an 18-month prison sentence Friday for Maria Butina, a Russian national who prosecutors claim helped the Russian government by reporting back to Moscow on key political figures in the U.S.

Prosecutors said in their court filing that Butina “was not a spy in the traditional sense” and is not a trained intelligence officer of the Kremlin. Instead, the government claims that Butina took part in a “spotting and assessing” operation on behalf of the Russian government to identify potential intelligence assets in the U.S.

Butina worked with a Russian government official identified as Alexander Torshin to infiltrate conservative groups like the National Rifle Association and to establish contacts with Republican presidential campaigns, according to prosecutors.

“Acquiring information valuable to a foreign power does not necessarily involve collecting classified documents or engaging in cloak-and-dagger activities,” prosecutors said in Friday’s filing.

“Something as basic as the identification of people who have the ability to influence policy in a foreign power’s favor is extremely attractive to those powers,” it said. “This identification could form the basis of other forms of intelligence operations, or targeting, in the future.”

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MUELLER REPORT UNDERCUTS SEVERAL STEELE DOSSIER CLAIMS, THOUGH THE SALACIOUS DOCUMENT IS BARELY MENTIONED

• The Steele dossier was the FBI’s roadmap for the collusion investigation, but the document is barely mentioned in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
• But the few references to the dossier paint an unflattering picture of the document, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
• Mueller’s report addresses some of the dossier’s claims about Michael Cohen, as well as the salacious claims about the Kremlin having blackmail material on President Trump.

The infamous Steele dossier, which served as the FBI’s roadmap to its investigation into Trump campaign collusion, is barely mentioned in the special counsel’s report, released on Thursday.

The word “dossier” doesn’t appear at all in the partially redacted report. Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign, is also not discussed. And Christopher Steele, a former British spy who wrote the dossier, is mentioned by name only 14 times in the 448-page document.

But the few references to the dossier contained in the report undercut many of the claims in the salacious document. And nothing in the Mueller report appears to bolster Steele’s report, which was cited heavily in the FBI’s applications to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Mueller’s report asserts that one of the dossier’s core claims about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is inaccurate. The report also cites statements from one witness who claimed that a purported blackmail tape of Donald Trump referenced in the dossier was fake.

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REPORT: CHRISTOPHER STEELE REFUSING TO MEET WITH DOJ INSPECTOR GENERAL, WHICH IS SCRUTINIZING EX-SPY’S DOSSIER

Christopher Steele declined to meet with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, which is reportedly poised to cast doubt on the veracity of some of the former British spy’s infamous anti-Trump dossier.

Steele declined the inspector general’s request on the grounds that it would be improper for him to take part “in an internal Justice Department investigation as a foreign national and former British intelligence agent,” Politico reported Wednesday.

The explanation is somewhat ironic given that Steele, a former MI6 officer, provided his anti-Trump research to the FBI as well as to Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department official.

Witnesses who have met with the inspector general’s office told Politico that they got the impression that investigators are “going to try and deeply undermine” Steele’s work.

The investigation is also likely “to cast doubt on the veracity of the information Steele provided about [Carter] Page that the FBI included in its application for a [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant,” according to Politico.

Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, opened an investigation on March 28, 2018 into whether the FBI abused the FISA by relying on Steele’s dossier to obtain spy warrants against Page. Horowitz’s investigation is expected to wrap up in May or June, according to sources familiar with the matter.

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FORMER BRITISH SPYMASTER HAS FLOWN UNDER RADAR IN RUSSIA PROBE, DESPITE LINKS TO KEY FIGURES

• Sir Richard Dearlove has links to several key players involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, including Christopher Steele, Stefan Halper and Michael Flynn.
• Despite that, Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has largely avoided media scrutiny, or that of American lawmakers probing the origins of the Russia investigation.
• Dearlove’s contacts with Steele, the dossier author, also have parallels to the former spy chief’s links to another “dodgy dossier.”

Sir Richard Dearlove has avoided scrutiny during the Russia probe, despite having links to several of the former spies, government informants and targets involved in the U.S. government’s collusion investigation.

Dearlove, who served as chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, had contact during the 2016 campaign with dossier author Christopher Steele. He is also a close colleague of Stefan Halper, the alleged FBI and CIA informant who established contact with several Trump campaign advisers. Dearlove and Halper attended a Cambridge political event in July 2016 where Halper had his first contact with Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

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‘SCANDALOUS AND IMMORAL’ OR FIRST AMENDMENT SPEECH? JUSTICES MULL ‘FUCT’ TRADEMARK

The Supreme Court spent Monday morning carefully avoiding an obscene four-letter word beginning with “f.”

The justices were considering a challenge to a provision of the 1946 Lanham Act which prohibits the registration of “scandalous and immoral” trademarks. American designer Erik Brunetti, who was denied a trademark for his “Fuct” fashion line, says the law violates the First Amendment.

How the justices would refer to the obscene subject matter at hand was an open question before Monday’s argument. The Supreme Court is a staid, well-mannered institution, while legal briefs filed in the case were necessarily replete with vulgarity. Ultimately the high court avoided any unseemly digressions, with deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart referring to the Fuct brand as “the equivalent of the profane past participle of the paradigmatic profane word in our culture.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch continued in that vein when asking Stewart to explain the government’s seemingly erratic practice where scandalous trademarks are concerned. Some would-be marks which are phonetically similar to profanity are denied, Gorsuch noted, while other similar applications are approved.

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MARK MEADOWS EXPECTS CRIMINAL REFERRALS IN DOJ WATCHDOG’S REPORT

North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said Sunday that he expects the Justice Department’s inspector general to issue criminal referrals as part of an investigation into the FBI’s possible abuse of the surveillance courts during the Trump-Russia probe.

“We’re fully anticipating that the [inspector general’s] report will come out as Attorney General Barr said in the next four to six weeks, and I think it’s highly likely that we’ll see criminal referrals coming from them that will correspond with what Chairman [Devin] Nunes has already put forth,” Meadows said in an interview on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Attorney General William Barr told Congress on Tuesday that he expects Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, to issue a report in late May or June. On March 28, 2018, Horowitz opened an investigation into whether the FBI and Justice Department complied with legal requirements to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Meadows, a close ally of President Trump’s, said that he and Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan met earlier this week with Horowitz. Both have expressed confidence in Horowitz’s work, and have heightened expectations that the investigation will be favorable to Republicans.

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ROD ROSENSTEIN DEFENDS ATTORNEY GENERAL’S HANDLING OF MUELLER REPORT

Outgoing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday defended Attorney General William Barr against allegations that he is misleading Congress and the public about the special counsel’s Russia report.

“He’s being as forthcoming as he can, and so this notion that he’s trying to mislead people, I think is just completely bizarre,” Rosenstein said in a rare interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Democrats have accused Barr of releasing misleading information about special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from his 22-month investigation, which focused on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as whether President Trump tried to obstruct the probe.

Barr sent a letter to Congress on March 24 saying that Mueller was unable to establish that collusion occurred. On the obstruction matter, Barr said that Mueller declined to make a decision one way or the other on whether to recommend a case against Trump.

Barr said that he conferred with Rosenstein and Justice Department lawyers and decided against pursuing a case. Barr said that since there was no allegation of conspiracy, Trump had no underlying crime to conceal by obstruction.

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FORMER OBAMA AIDE EXPECTS TO BE INDICTED IN CASE RELATED TO MUELLER PROBE

Gregory B. Craig, who served in the Obama administration as a White House counsel, is said to be expecting charges pursuant to the Mueller investigation.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Craig’s attorneys were expecting him to be indicted “in the coming days” and that the charges would be related to information uncovered by special counsel Robert Mueller and his team during the course of their investigation.

The Washington Post linked Craig to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, saying that “the expected indictment — which his attorneys called ‘a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion’ — stems from work Craig did with GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort on behalf of the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice in 2012.”

According to the Post, Craig was a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom at the time — a position he resigned in April 2018 amid an investigation into whether the firm’s partners had failed to register as foreign lobbyists while working with Ukraine.

Craig’s attorneys also released a statement claiming their client’s innocence. “Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge,” they said.

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SECOND HASSAN STAFFER ALLEGEDLY HELPED AIDE STEAL MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SENATE DATA

• A former Senate IT aide to Sen. Maggie Hassan, Jackson Cosko, admitted he stole tens of thousands of documents, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and the contents of the entire network drive from the New Hampshire Democrat.
• Cosko allegedly used stolen private data about senators to “doxx” Republicans during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
• In a plea deal, Cosko — whom Hassan had fired for other misconduct before the theft — said he worked with an accomplice who helped him gain access and wiped his fingerprints.
• A court case has been opened against Samantha DeForest-Davis, a former Hassan aide who a source with knowledge of the situation said is the alleged accomplice.

A second onetime aide to Sen. Maggie Hassan is implicated in former IT staffer Jackson Cosko’s massive data-theft scheme that was ultimately used to “intimidate” Republican senators by “doxxing” them during a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, prosecutors said.

Samantha G. DeForest-Davis, at the time a staff assistant to Hassan, was the aide who allegedly helped Cosko conduct his scheme, a source with knowledge of the situation told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Court records show a case naming her has been opened, and the source confirmed it relates to her alleged role in the data theft.

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‘I’M CONCERNED’: OBAMA-ERA FINANCE GURU LAYS OUT WHERE DEMS ARE GOING WRONG

Former President Barack Obama’s finance manager said Monday that the current crop of Democratic candidates vying for the White House is falling well behind those who ran during the 2008 presidential election.

“I have to say it: I’m concerned by how little money the 2020 Dem candidates are raising,” former Massachusetts congressman Rufus Gifford told his Twitter followers. Gifford, who was Obama’s finance director during the former president’s re-election campaign in 2012, went on to highlight reasons for his concerns.

“For context: in Q1 2007 with individuals able to give less money ($2100 vs $2800 now) which was the last time there was a large Dem primary field, the top three candidates were: Hillary: 26 mill Obama: 24 mill (John) Edwards: 14 mill,” he noted before asking one of his Twitter followers why 2020 candidates are not raising money.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reportedly raised a massive amount of money in February, even if some of the party’s candidates are not pulling in as much cash as previous year’s campaigns. The DCCC reported that $3 million came from online donations, with an average online donation of $18.

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GIULIANI: NOT WORRIED ‘AT ALL’ ABOUT MUELLER REPORT

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani expressed confidence Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report will not contain damaging information for President Donald Trump.

Giuliani said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” he is “not worried … at all” about the report, “except for little quibbles.”

Giuliani also said he believes the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, should be provided all of the information from the Mueller report he has requested from the Justice Department.

Nadler and other congressional Democrats have accused Attorney General William Barr of engaging in a cover-up of the Mueller findings because the Justice Department has not immediately handed over the report.

Barr has said he plans to release a version of the Mueller report to Congress by the middle of April. He is reviewing the report to determine whether grand jury and classified information has to be withheld.

Democrats’ allegations intensified Friday after it was reported that several members of the Mueller team were frustrated by a letter Barr sent Congress on March 24 laying out the core conclusions of the Mueller probe.

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CAMBRIDGE ACADEMIC REFLECTS ON INTERACTIONS WITH ‘SPYGATE’ FIGURE

• A Cambridge University post-graduate student is speaking out about her interactions with Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor who was revealed in 2018 as a longtime FBI and CIA informant.
• Svetlana Lokhova claims Halper was behind false allegations provided to U.S. intelligence that she attempted to compromise Michael Flynn at an event held at Cambridge in 2014.
• Halper is known to have made contact with three Trump campaign aides — Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos. His links to Flynn have largely gone unexplored.

Svetlana Lokhova did not get along with Stefan Halper, which is what she says made a dinner invitation to the Cambridge University professor’s home in January 2016 all the more peculiar.

“Halper was a lurking presence with a horrible aura — I avoided him,” said Lokhova, a Cambridge post-graduate student who studies Soviet-era espionage.

Lokhova dodged the invitation to Halper’s home, which she said was sent to her by Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge professor and official historian for MI5, the British domestic intelligence service. But the past three years have revealed new details about Halper and other activities that went on at Cambridge that have caused Lokhova to question why she was asked to that dinner at Halper’s.

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HOUSE CHAIRMAN ASKS IRS FOR SIX YEARS OF TRUMP TAXES

The Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asked the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday for six years of President Donald Trump’s personal tax returns and those of his businesses.

In a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal said he wanted to investigate whether the IRS is following its policy of auditing the sitting president’s and vice president’s tax returns.

“Little is known about the effectiveness of this program. On behalf of the American people, the Ways and Means Committee must determine if that policy is being followed, and, if so, whether these audits are conducted fully and appropriately,” wrote Neal, who is seeking records for between 2013 and 2018.

Neal insisted in his letter that he is not seeking Trump’s taxes for political reasons.

“This request is about policy, not politics; my preparations were made on my own track and timeline, entirely independent of other activities in Congress and the Administration,” he said. “My actions reflect an abiding reverence for our democracy and our institutions, and are in no way based on emotion of the moment or partisanship.”

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PETER STRZOK’S BOSS THOUGHT EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIR MADE HIM VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

The FBI’s top counterintelligence official told Congress last June that he believed an affair between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page made the two FBI officials vulnerable to foreign intelligence services.

Bill Priestap, the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence, told lawmakers in closed-door testimony on June 5, 2018, that he confronted Strzok and Page after hearing rumors that they were having an extramarital relationship.

“But after Pete had been reporting to me for a considerable amount of time, somebody brought to my attention that that behavior might be going on. And so that’s when it — I became aware that that was a possibility,” Priestap said, according to a transcript of his testimony released Tuesday by Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

Priestap, who identified his tipster as either Sally Moyer, a Justice Department lawyer, or Jonathan Moffa, an FBI counterintelligence officer, said that he spoke to Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as well as Strzok and Page, about their affair.

“I felt I owed it to them. Lisa did not report to me, but I felt that they ought to be aware of what was being said. I didn’t ask them if it was true, but they needed to know that that impression was out there,” he said.

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FIRMS TIED TO FUSION GPS, CHRISTOPHER STEELE WERE PAID $3.8 MILLION BY SOROS-BACKED GROUP

• The Democracy Integrity Project, a nonprofit that receives funding from George Soros, paid firms tied to Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele more than $3.8 million in 2017.
• Tax filings show that The Democracy Integrity Project provided its research to “government entities.”
• The group’s founder, a former staffer for Dianne Feinstein, has described it as a “shadow media organization” that helps the government.

A nonprofit group partially funded by billionaire activist George Soros paid firms tied to Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele more than $3.8 million in 2017 to provide research and analysis to “government entities,” according to IRS filings.

The payments made by The Democracy Integrity Project are more than three times what the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS and Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign to investigate Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia.

Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Clinton campaign, paid $1 million to Fusion GPS in 2016 to investigate Trump. Fusion GPS in turn paid Steele, a former MI6 officer, nearly $170,000 for a project that resulted in the infamous Steele dossier.

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INVESTIGATE STEELE DOSSIER AS RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION, INTEL EXPERTS SAY

• Robert Mueller’s finding of no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia undercuts the Steele dossier’s core claim of a “well-developed conspiracy” to influence the 2016 election.
• Intelligence experts said the dossier should be investigated as possible Russian disinformation.
• “The intelligence community was misled,” an intelligence expert said.

In a deposition for a lawsuit related to the dossier in June 2018, former British spy Christopher Steele acknowledged his infamous report could be the product of Russian disinformation.

But Steele, a former MI6 officer who worked in Moscow, dismissed the possibility he was hoodwinked by Russian operatives who planted anti-Trump dirt.

“All material contained this risk, but that any information that was actually provided would have been subject to scrutiny in respect of this risk,” Steele said in a June 18, 2018, deposition for a lawsuit against BuzzFeed, the original publisher of the dossier.

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