Trump file blocked in New York, has not triggered an investigation in Russia, sources said

President Donald Trump and his allies have long insisted that what he calls the "fake dummy" was entirely "responsible for launching the witch hunt totally and discredited" by Special Adviser Robert Mueller.

But from July 2016, this so-called "file" was placed for several weeks in an organized crime unit of the FBI office in New York, even as counter-intelligence agents in Washington. Russia to deflect American democracy.

Trump doubled his "record" charge this week, ordering the US Department of Justice and intelligence to release more of the classified information used to investigate one of his advisers, the US-based consultant. Yorkman Carter Page. will be revealed that there was no basis "for monitoring.

Despite what Trump and like-minded politicians said, sources told ABC News that the "record" was clearly not the initial basis for the federal investigation.

The following report, sent to ABC News by several sources close to the federal inquiry, shows that the FBI's investigation into contacts between Russian members and Trump's campaign team, including Page, was well under way. the summer of 2016. handed the FBI a package of surprising and salacious claims related to Trump.

In fact, the FBI already had an open case of counterintelligence on the page when it became a volunteer on Trump's foreign policy team in January 2016, according to sources close to the case.

At that time, Trump had publicly declared "a good instinct" about ruthless Russian President Vladimir Putin, praising the way Putin "ran his country" inside the United States.

Trump's refusal to criticize Putin – even in the private – "mystified" then FBI director James Comey, he later reminded ABC News.

And three years earlier, when the FBI followed in 2013 two Russian spies in New York, agents secretly recorded one of the spies saying he wanted to "recruit" Page "as a source of intelligence." Page had lived in Moscow for three years.

Page has never been charged with any crime and claims to have cooperated with this previous investigation, but sources told ABC News that his record, like many counter-intelligence files, had never been closed.

Thus, two months after Mr. Page began advising Trump's campaign, the FBI visited him in New York, asking him for contacts with Russian intelligence services, according to a government document.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

"An act of war?"

In the spring of 2016, the US intelligence community had no idea that the Russian government was about to launch one of its most sophisticated and effective operations against the United States. Russian hackers have stolen hundreds of thousands of e-mails from democratic institutions and a global battalion of robots armed with "false information" has been deployed on social media.

"In what circumstances is piracy considered an act of war?" Asked the spokesman for the State Department on June 14, 2016, the day the Democratic National Committee revealed that its systems had been tampered with. violated. The government spokesman refused to answer.

Three weeks later, Carter Page appeared in Moscow. He delivered the opening speech at the New Economic School, linked to some senior Kremlin officials, and the event was broadcast live online.

"I am particularly grateful for my relationship with the faculty and staff of the new economic school," he said at the beginning of his remarks, insisting that he was "as a private citizen ".

The date was July 7, 2016. The name of the page does not appear in the "file" for two weeks.

The "record", in fact, was not a single document, but a series of 17 separate reports, compiled over six months by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Steele was working for someone he knew well in Washington, Glenn Simpson, whose firm Fusion GPS was hired by the DNC to conduct opposition research on Trump.

In mid-July 2016, Steele wanted to report his findings to the US government. He met two long-time friends: Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS and who, like him, closely followed organized crime and Jonathan Winer spoke publicly about his contact with Steele.

It is unclear whether Ohr relayed Steele's reports to anyone at the time – there is no public evidence to suggest that Ohr transmitted it at that time. But the State Department's response to Steele was brutal: if you're so worried, bring it to the FBI.

That's what Steele did.

The "file" goes to the FBI, but to "the wrong person"

In July 2016, Steele had long-standing contact with the FBI and had a reputation for finding solid and verifiable information, sources told ABC News.

He had been a reliable informant of the US government, providing alone about 120 documents on Russia's efforts abroad, unrelated to Trump.

A few years earlier, Steele helped an FBI agent in Rome to create a massive corruption network in international football. The case against FIFA made the headlines of international newspapers.

Victoria Jones / PA via AP / FILE

Attempting to take advantage of this relationship in July 2016, Steele sent the FBI agent in Rome the opposition research on Trump that he had generated for GPS Fusion.

The Rome-based officer then forwarded the reports to an agent with whom he worked in the FBI's New York Field Office – an agent specializing in criminal organizations and organized crime, not counterintelligence, who reported sources at ABC News.

According to an informed source on the investigation in Russia, it was "the wrong person" to send the reports to.

Steele's research spanned weeks in the FBI field office in New York, hundreds of kilometers away from agents in Washington, examining links between Trump's associates and the Russian government, sources said.

"It took a lot of time for the New York office to see it and realize what it was," said another source at ABC News, referring to the "record".

An account of the FBI inquiry released in February by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee reflected the delay.

"Steele's report was not sent to the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at the FBI headquarters until mid-September 2016, more than seven weeks after the opening of the FBI." Investigation by the FBI,.

"At that time, the FBI had already opened sub-investigations on [multiple] individuals linked to the Trump campaign, "including Carter Page," notes the memo.

In particular, the FBI was already closely examining Trump's campaign director, Paul Manafort.

Manafort spent years working on pro-Russian projects in Ukraine, and the FBI interviewed him in 2013 and 2014 on these foreign business transactions. Then, in September 2016, the National Security Division of the Justice Department sent Manafort a letter informing him that he was back in the crosshairs.

But what really triggered the alarm at the FBI in the summer of 2016 was an Australian diplomat: Before the DNC became public, a campaign staff member, George Papadopoulos, told him that Hillary Clinton, at know thousands of emails.

The "record" reaches Washington – and the media

In mid-September 2016, Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was helping to conduct the investigation in Russia, received an "initial batch" of reports from Steele.

"The first time I know the FBI has this information – the first time I saw it – was in mid-September," he recently told legislators under oath.

In the days that followed, Comey was informed of Steele's findings, according to Comey's public statements.

Steele, meanwhile, was meeting with journalists in Washington, seeking to share with them some of what he had already given to the FBI. Steele did not show them copies of his reports, but he shared the "indications" of a "possible coordination of members of the Trump campaign team and Russian officials," as Steele will describe it. later in British court records.

In a few days, the media started publishing what Steele had told them. And Capitol Hill lawmakers then pressed Comey on the reports at a hearing on September 28, 2016.

T.J. Kirkpatrick / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Comey would not answer specific questions, claiming that it would require him to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. But he suggested: "Our counter-intelligence investigators are working hard to understand what harm is Russia in our election."

It is unclear whether, at that time, the FBI was already drafting the application that it was going to file with the foreign intelligence monitoring court to secretly monitor the Page. Two sources, however, have stated that it takes "weeks" to set up an application like this.

On October 21, 2016, the FBI and the Department of Justice formally filed their applications with the court. It was more than 50 pages.

On the basis of a heavily redacted version published by the FBI, five pages covered the "links of the page" with the Russian intelligence services, at least five pages summarizing information on alleged links of Page with Russia and six pages .

In particular, the request specified Mr. Steele's allegations that Mr. Page met with two of Putin's closest associates in Moscow two months earlier. Page denied having met them, and no evidence was published to support this part of Steele's report.

However, Page will acknowledge later that in Moscow, he sent an email to Trump's campaign staff saying he had "a private conversation" with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich who expressed his support for M Trump on "current international problems".

Nevertheless, with the presidential election in less than three weeks, the FBI took no firm action to advance its investigation.

As Comey later explained to the internal investigators, he believed in a "do nothing" rule so close to elections.

"[We] avoid taking action that could have an impact, even unknown, on an election, be it a dogcatcher election or the US president, "he told investigators.

Chris Wattie / Reuters

Ohr becomes Steele's conduit

While the FBI refrained from taking public action in its investigation, Steele was increasingly worried about Trump by the end of autumn 2016.

He even told Ohr that he was "desperate that Donald Trump was not elected," as Ohr later recalled in the notes.

But Steele lost his direct line with the FBI in the final days of October 2016, after the FBI realized he was talking to the press about his discoveries and his secret relations with the US government.

A week before the presidential election, the FBI suspended his relationship with Steele and told him to "not act to obtain any information on behalf of the FBI," according to FBI documents released since.

Steele, however, shared his findings with Ohr, which became a way for the FBI to continue to receive information gathered by Steele.

In fact, according to congressional documents, in the month following Trump's presidency, Ohr met twice with FBI officials, including Lisa Page and Strzok, the senior official working on the Russian investigation.

Ohr informed other senior colleagues in the criminal division of the Justice Department of his contacts with Steele, but he did not inform his superiors of the Deputy Attorney General's office, which he stated as Deputy Attorney General. .

In a private interview with lawmakers, Ohr said he had not informed his bosses because he was simply passing on information to a reliable source and he did not think he should do so, according to a source close to testimony of the Congress of Ohr.

With regards to Thanksgiving in 2016, it was still unclear whether a member of a high-level government was aware of the information that Chris had collected and provided to the FBI, Simpson later told investigators Congress.

So Steele and Simpson decided to give Steele reports to Ohr – someone one of the highest placed, as Simpson described Ohr.

On December 10, 2016, Simpson met Ohr at a Washington coffee shop and handed at least one USB key to Ohr. Ohr did not look at the contents of the USB key, although he suspected it might be related to Steele's work on Trump, Ohr later told Congressional investigators, according to a source close to the testimony.

The day before, the late Senator John McCain handed his own copy of Steele's report to Comey, according to sources close to the exchanges.

Separately, Ohr sent his newly obtained material to the FBI.

"[Our FBI colleague] met with Bruce and got more things today, "Strzok told Lisa Page in a text message on December 20, 2016.

"Yeah, a lot to read, but it's been too stressful," said the FBI's lawyer.

Three weeks later, on January 9, 2017, Steele's reports became public when Buzzfeed published them online.

The FBI investigation is heating up

"Hey, let me know when you can talk," Strzok wrote to Lisa Page on January 10, 2017. "We are discussing whether, now that it's out, we're using it as pretext to interview some people.

The cat was out of the bag and the publication of Steele's reports gave the FBI a base to take more open measures.

Three days after texting Lisa, Strzok began contacting people identified by the FBI as sources for Steele's reports.

"[W]We just want to talk to him quietly, "recalls Strzok, speaking to a lawyer representing one of Steele's sources.

"This is the news, is not it?" Quotes Strzok's lawyer as a respondent.

Indeed, it was the case.

The FBI, meanwhile, was starting to focus on other topics unrelated to Steele's reporting. For the first time, agents questioned two key Trump associates: Michael Flynn, a national security advisor at the time, and George Papadopoulos, the advisor who had been told that Russia had stolen Hillary Clinton.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

In these interviews, confirmed later in their guilty pleas, Flynn lied about his contacts with Russian officials, and Papadopoulos lied about his own interactions with individuals linked to the Kremlin.

These false statements of January 2017 "hindered the FBI's ongoing investigation into the existence of links or coordination between individuals associated with [Trump] Russia's campaign and efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, "would later admit Flynn and Papadopoulos in court.

At about the same time, the FBI made another request to the Foreign Intelligence Oversight Court, asking a federal judge for permission to continue monitoring Carter Page's communications. The request noted that the FBI had suspended its relationship with Steele, but said that his information was still considered "reliable as previous reports of [him] has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings ".

The latest FBI submission was 66 pages, almost 16 pages longer than the initial request.

Meanwhile, FBI officials continued to meet with Ohr, speaking with him at least eight times in the months following Trump's inauguration, including twice after the appointment of Robert Mueller in May 2017.

In June 2017, one month after Mueller's appointment, the FBI filed a new application with the Foreign Intelligence Review Tribunal to continue following Carter Page. The application was 77 pages long.

A fourth and final request was filed three months later.

The highly written versions of the applications were published in July.

Trump issues an order

On Monday, Trump ordered that more portions of the application as of June 2017 be released.

It is not clear why Trump did not order the release of sections from other applications, but the first application in October 2016 was based on information provided by Steele, not information provided by Ohr.

Trump also ordered the publication of the FBI notes of Ohr meetings with the agency about what Steele was telling him. The Department of Justice and the National Intelligence Director are currently reviewing the documents covered by Trump's order and may request redactions.

Evan Vucci / AP

Trump's decision to release more classified information came days after several members of the Republican House held a press conference asking him to declassify the documents, along with Representative Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. "On" the misdeeds that occurred. "

But the Democrats quickly condemned what they called Trump's "manifest abuse of power."

"[He] decided to intervene in an ongoing judicial investigation by ordering the selective publication of documents which, in his view, are useful to his defense team and which will help advance a false story, "said Adam Schiff, D- Calif., Said in a statement Monday.

Trump's order came three days after Manafort – in a case unrelated to Steele's report – pleaded guilty to financial crimes and agreed to cooperate with Mueller's office.

"President Trump's actions … are a frenetic and direct response to the dramatic events that took place last Friday," said senior Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees – Rep. Jerrold Nadler, DN.Y. be p. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md. – said in a statement Monday.

Having already pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities, Papadopoulos was recently sentenced to two weeks in prison. Nor was his case related to Steele's report.

Flynn, who also pleaded guilty to lying to authorities and agreed to cooperate with Mueller, should be sentenced in the coming weeks – another case unrelated to Steele's report.

The enlarged federal probe, meanwhile, continues.

The FBI declined to comment on this article.