Hillary Clinton has defended her campaign for paying for the infamous Steele dossier into Donald Trump.

The former presidential candidate told Trevor Noah on the Daily Show that 'of course' there is a difference between paying for that information and colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Clinton said the dossier was simply 'opposition research' and pointed to the fact that it was not public knowledge during the election.

Hillary Clinton defended paying for the Steele dossier on The Daily Show, saying it was simply 'opposition research' that never became public during the election

Clinton, pictured leaving The Daily Show on crutches after hurting her foot in the UK, said the fact that the FBI was looking into Trump's links to Russia should have been made public

But she added that the public should have been aware that the FBI started investigating Trump's ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.

Clinton has previously blamed her election loss on the fact that James Comey reopened the FBI investigation into her emails and made that fact public.

In her book What Happened, Clinton accused the former FBI director of 'shivving' her over the emails and causing a drop in the polls.

Speaking about the dossier, Clinton said: 'It was research that started by a Republican donor during the primary, and then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer [Marc Elias] and said, "would you like us to continue it?"

'He said yes. He’s an experienced lawyer, he knows what the law is, he knows what opposition research is.

'From my perspective, it didn’t come out before the election, as we all know, and what also didn’t come out, which I think is an even bigger problem... is that the American people didn’t even know that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016.

'I know that voters should have had that information. That’s something that may have influenced some people. And it’s part of what happens in a campaign, where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out into the public arena is accurate.

'So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated, but the fact of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia should have come out.'

Hillary Clinton's campaign lawyer Marc E. Elias hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt about Donald Trump, but falsely denied involvement to reporters

Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christoper Steele to put the dossier together

Clinton is facing an investigation by the Federal Elections Commission over the dossier, after the Campaign Legal Center alleged she funneled money meant for 'legal services' into opposition research instead.

Clinton's presidential campaign and the DNC is accused of using legal firm Perkins Coie as a pass-through to Fusion GPS, the firm which hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier.

The Washington Free Beacon, which is funded in part by billionaire Paul Singer, allegedly started funding the dossier back in 2015.

The deal with Clinton and the DNC allegedly began in the spring of 2016, when Elias was approached by Fusion GPS, and lasted until right before Election Day.

After the DNC and the Clinton campaign started paying, Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele to do the dirt-digging. His work later resulted in the dossier.

Trump has called the material 'phony stuff,' and on Wednesday he portrayed himself as the aggrieved party.

The president posted a quote on Twitter that he attributed to Fox News: "Clinton campaign & DNC paid for research that led to the anti-Trump Fake News Dossier. The victim here is the President".'

President Trump has repeatedly denied the claims contained within the document, describing them as 'phony stuff'

Trump called himself a 'victim' of the infamous dossier that Democrats helped pay to produce

The FBI has worked to corroborate the document, and special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, questioned Steele weeks ago.

The dossier circulated in Washington last year and was turned over to the FBI for its review. It contends that Russia was engaged in a long-standing effort to aid Trump and had amassed compromising information about the Republican.

Among its wild claims was that Russian officials have videos of the president cavorting with prostitutes, filmed during Trump's 2013 visit to a luxury Moscow hotel for the Miss Universe contest

It also contains a highly unusual and unsubstantiated report that the call girls performed a 'golden shower' routine that involved them urinating on a hotel bed as a sign of disgust for then-president Barack Obama.

It is claimed that Barack Obama's campaign organization, Obama For America, paid Perkins Coie almost $1million to fund the research.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the disgraced former DNC chair, has also denied any knowledge of how the dossier was put together.