In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI has released a significantly redacted version of the two-page document former FBI Director James Comey used for reference when he briefed President Trump and President Obama about the Christopher Steele dossier and its contents.
CNN:
The document was provided to CNN by the public records advocacy group James Madison Project, which, alongside Politico, had sued for it and received it from the FBI on Friday night following a judge's order.
“An FBI source … volunteered highly politically sensitive information … on Russian influence efforts aimed at the US presidential election,” the memo labeled as “Annex A” says. “The source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI.”
“The source’s reporting appears to have been acquired by multiple Western press organizations starting in October,” the document from January 2017 declares.
Comey has said he did not show or give Trump the memo, but used it as a reference when briefing him on the dossier, which U.S. intelligence officials feared Russia might try to use as blackmail against Trump.
The dossier has been a source of controversy and weaponized by the president's allies who, in spite of evidence to the contrary, continue to claim prosecutors failed to disclose who paid for the dossier (they did) when they used it to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page (they did not). George Papadopoulos' conversation with an Australian in London about Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton is what sparked the Russia probe, and Page's Russian contacts had been of concern to federal officials for years prior to his advising the Trump campaign.
In 2013, Page met and passed documents to a since-exposed Russian spy.
CNN:
The FBI said it couldn't find records that would satisfy Politico and the James Madison Project's other freedom of information requests in the lawsuit; they had also asked the government to turn over investigative files and final determinations regarding the FBI's vetting of the dossier.
The FBI said Friday it lacked any records indicating final conclusions about any information in the dossier, said Brad Moss, one of the attorneys pressing for release of the records.
“After two years of legal games, the FBI today finally confirmed two pieces of speculation about the scandalous allegations regarding which Director Comey briefed President Trump in January 2017: all of those allegations remain part of the ongoing Russian ‘collusion’ investigation, and the FBI has not rendered final determinations about the accuracy of any of them,” Moss said. “Far from being debunked, the issues that raised concerns for the Intelligence Community in 2017 remain unresolved to this day.”
FBI releases document intel officials used to brief Trump on dossier (CNN)
FBI releases part of Russia dossier summary used to brief Trump, Obama (Politico)