Sen. Chuck Grassley called the plan, first reported in The Washington Post, “troubling” and posed a set of 12 questions to FBI Director James Comey. | AP Photo Grassley blasts alleged FBI plan to pay former British spy for Trump intel

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is seeking records and information from a reported plan at the FBI to pay the former British intelligence officer behind a dossier of compromising but unsubstantiated information about President Donald Trump to continue his work.

In a letter from Grassley (R-Iowa) to FBI Director James Comey that the senator’s office made public Monday afternoon, Grassley called the plan, first reported in The Washington Post, “troubling” and posed a set of 12 questions to Comey.


According to the Post, the FBI had reached an agreement weeks before Election Day with former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to continue his investigation into ties between Trump and the Russian government. Steele’s earlier work had been bankrolled by Trump’s political opponents and was made public during the presidential transition period when BuzzFeed published the dossier of unverified information in full, after CNN reported that it existed.

“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises substantial questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” Grassley wrote. “It is additionally troubling that the FBI reportedly agreed to such an arrangement given that, in January of 2017, [former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper] issued a statement stating that ‘the [intelligence community] has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.’”

The FBI never wound up paying Steele, the Post reported, and plans to fund his continued probing into Trump’s ties to the Russian government were shelved once the dossier was made public.

As Grassley noted in his letter, the intelligence community under former President Barack Obama offered public assurances that while the intelligence community was aware of the dossier, it was not the basis of any intelligence or conclusions. But the fact that the FBI was planning to pay Steele to continue his investigation is seeming proof that the bureau thought him and his work sufficiently credibly to merit continued probing.