It's apparent that you cannot answer a question. What precisely did Team Mueller say about Putin's plans regarding the Russian disinformation campaign represented by hildebeest's Steele dossier? Why can you not answer that question? Originally Posted by I B Hankering
Volume I
Footnote 465
This footnote addresses a question that has been raised time and again, and which was echoed by Attorney General William Barr in his testimony to Congress on April 10: What was the basis, or predicate, for the Russia investigation?
The White House has claimed that the investigation was based on the “Steele Dossier,” an intelligence report compiled by a former British spy and financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which alleged that there were ties between Trump and the Kremlin. But in this footnote, Mueller explains the sequence and timing of events that gave rise to a credible threat to national security, warranting an investigation. First, Mueller notes earlier in the report that in July 2016, Wikileaks began disseminating emails stolen from the DNC. A few days later, the U.S. intelligence community assessed with “high confidence” that the Russian government had orchestrated the hack of these emails. Within a week of that release, a foreign government informed the FBI that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, told a representative of their government that Russia had offered to “assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.” Mueller states that this information “is contained in the case-opening document and related materials.” This means that it was these facts, not the Steele Dossier, which raised an open question on whether Russia had attempted or was trying to attempt to coordinate with members of the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential campaign and led to the official opening of an investigation.