This morning Trump accused the FBI of making payments to Christopher Steele, presumably for the discredited dossier.
Here’s the tweet:
Wow! FBI made 11 payments to Fake Dossier’s discredited author, Trump hater Christopher Steele. @OANN @JudicialWatch The Witch Hunt has been a total fraud on your President and the American people! It was brought to you by Dirty Cops, Crooked Hillary and the DNC.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2019
I’m admittedly a little confused by this.
Steele worked for the FBI in 2016, so of course he would have been paid by the FBI for whatever spy work he was doing.
But it sounds like Trump is implying that the FBI paid for the dossier with these 11 payments?
The only information I can find about these 11 payments is from Judicial Watch’s reporting last August:
The documents show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unknown reasons in February 2016.
I’m not sure why Trump is tweeting about this now, but perhaps there’s more to this story we are yet to learn.