CNN Report: Intelligence Agencies Corroborate Buzzfeed Dossier, Evaluated by a former Intelligence Analyst
On Friday, February 10th, CNN released additional information concerning a dossier of information that alleges ties between Donald Trump’s operation and the Kremlin. The CNN article reports that U.S. investigators had “corroborated some aspects” of the original “Buzzfeed dossier,” as it has become known. That U.S. investigators have corroborated aspects of the Buzzfeed dossier unquestionably raises the risk that U.S. national security has been compromised, and demands that the investigation must continue. Further, the CNN report is all the more prevalent now that National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has had confirmed unethical or possibly illegal contacts with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
To briefly review, the Buzzfeed dossier contains 35 pages of intelligence reports produced by a private firm run by former British MI-6 agent Christopher Steele. Several individual reports within the dossier claim coordination between Donald Trump’s entourage and the Kremlin during the 2016 election, and allege that the Kremlin has compromising information on Trump personally. It made news in early January when CNN reported that U.S. intelligence community leaders had briefed former President Barack Obama and then President-Elect Trump about a synopsis of the dossier’s contents. The FBI deemed the dossier credible enough to launch its own investigation.
After Buzzfeed released its dossier on January 10th, I published a piece on Medium evaluating the credibility of the source and sub-sources contained within it. I concluded that the dossier’s sources “should be judged on their individual merits as credible with moderate-to-high confidence” and that “there’s enough evidence there that it would be irresponsible not to consider how this could impact our nation’s security.”
I wanted to explain what had already happened: the U.S. intelligence community had determined that Christopher Steele was indeed a former MI-6 agent and that he had reported credible information out of Russia via quality sources for some time. In my piece, I essentially argued for a continuation of the “intelligence cycle,” the dynamic process whereby the intelligence community gathers information, analyzes its credibility, and assigns collectors additional tasks. Each step in the process is part of the iterative search for ultimate truth or fabrication of the original information.
Friday’s CNN article stating that U.S. investigators had corroborated aspects of the dossier is an important step. While the news does not establish the dossier’s truth beyond a shadow of doubt, corroboration of details of the Buzzfeed dossier lends credibility to former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele’s professionalism and the quality of his sub-sources. And while aspects of the dossier may be disproven in the future, it’s important to remember that when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer calls the CNN article “fake news,” it’s anything but.
Here’s the most substantial quote from CNN’s February 10th report:
None of the newly learned information relates to the salacious allegations in the dossier. Rather it relates to conversations between foreign nationals. The dossier details about a dozen conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals. Sources would not confirm which specific conversations were intercepted or the content of those discussions due to the classified nature of U.S. intelligence collection programs.
But the intercepts do confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials. CNN has not confirmed whether any content relates to then-candidate Trump.
The corroboration, based on intercepted communications, has given US intelligence and law enforcement “greater confidence” in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents, these sources say.
There’s a lot we can infer from these details. First, the February 10th CNN article indicates that U.S. investigators have not confirmed the allegation that Trump hired several prostitutes to the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow to urinate on one another in the bed where the Obamas slept.
The CNN article’s key section refers to the “conversations between foreign nationals,” strongly implying that U.S. investigators corroborated conversations between two Russians. This point is important because the U.S. intelligence community can only collect information on foreign nationals. The minute that information is shared with a “U.S. person” as defined in Executive Order 12333 of December 1981, then the collector would require a special warrant. If the U.S. investigators did seek warrants on U.S. persons to corroborate this information, those warrants should be available via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The February 10th CNN article says the intelligence community verified the conversations through “intercepts,” which of course implies that conversations in question were conducted on the phone. The U.S. intelligence community, likely the National Security Agency, could access these conversations by reviewing its vast existing databases of recorded calls. Yes, the NSA plucks thousands of international mobile phone conversations out of the air every second of every day.
It’s important to understand how we likely got here. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele’s trusted sources in Russia provided him details of conversations to which they were privy. This is called HUMINT, or human intelligence: reported information that comes through a chain of individuals. In this case, Steele’s source could be reporting information that was originally discussed by two individuals on the phone, then reported to him in person. That’s why U.S. investigators backtracked to see whether they had recorded conversations that match up with the information in the dossier.
The problem is that very few of the dossier’s conversations are associated with two specific names. Often, they’re framed as “a discussion between a trusted compatriot and a senior member of the Kremlin” or “an official close to the head the Presidential Administration Sergey Ivanov.” Based on the information in the dossier alone, the intelligence community would not have known the names of both parties speaking on the phone, much less their numbers. They would have more information to search the database. They could have only gotten the names by going back to Christopher Steele or by getting help from sources within Russia. Either would be perfectly valid.
Once they have searchable information, the NSA’s next step would simply be to review its databases for conversations that match the times of phone calls between two foreigners detailed in the dossier.
Records like this are called called SIGINT, or “signals intelligence,” and refers to intelligence gathered by intercepted electronic communications. In a vacuum, SIGINT can be both powerful and potentially misleading: it can give the collector precise information, but may lack context and lead to incorrect conclusions. However, the corroboration of HUMINT by SIGNINT is one of the most powerful forms of confirmation that the intelligence community has.
The February 10th CNN article is very likely reporting this type of confirmation, and that the reason it should be taken so seriously.
Incidentally, I’ve gone through the dossier and identified the conversations that have clearly occurred between two Russians and plausibly happened over the phone. CNN’s report lists about a dozen possible conversations like this, and that’s about correct.
I could list each conversation and then we could play a guessing game about which ones the intelligence community might have specifically corroborated. But that’s not really important. The vast majority of conversations in the Buzzfeed dossier detail some sort of connection between Trump’s organization and the Kremlin, or how the Kremlin is reacting to news that the story has broken in the U.S. media. If the intelligence community has corroborated any of these, then that’s quite significant and quite damning.
The bottom line is that the intelligence community has confirmed that the national security risks described in the Buzzfeed dossier are credible. The investigation must continue.
Jim Arkedis is a former Defense Department counterterrorism and counterintelligence analyst. He is the president of 4DPAC and the co-director of the PutUSFirst campaign, which seeks to raise awareness about Trump’s conflicts of interest and their impact on our national security. Follow him on Twitter @JimArkedis
