The Justice Department's inspector general has been scrutinizing the FBI's use of information from the Steele dossier to conduct surveillance on President Donald Trump and his associates from his 2016 presidential campaign and will release his report as soon as next month, Politico reports.
IG Michael Horowitz has been examining the FBI for close to a year and is investigating whether the agency possibly abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in October 2016 when it pulled a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page based in part on information from Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who claimed he was told by sources that Page and other Trump associates were working with Russians to help Trump win the election and boost Trump's businesses.
The IG is reportedly focused on gauging Steele's credibility as a source for the FBI, and the report "is going to try and deeply undermine Steele," according to a source who spoke with Politico.
FISA allows U.S. agencies to secretly intercept a target's communications with court approval.
Horowitz is also looking into whether FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged anti-Trump text messages while working on the Russia investigation, were guided by politics in their official actions.
Trump has long slammed the dossier as "phony" and a "con job."
The dossier was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017 after the election.
Steele was being paid for his research by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was funded in part by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
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