Trump just publicly accused the FBI of having conspired against him

Source: VOX

As president, Donald Trump is in charge of the FBI. Which makes it incredibly striking that, in a Thursday morning tweet, Trump accused the bureau of having conspired to spread false intelligence about him during the 2016 election:

The reference to “Fake Dossier” is to the infamous Steele dossier, a list of allegations about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia put together last summer by retired British spy Christopher Steele. It’s the source of many of the most extreme claims about Trump, including that he paid prostitutes to pee on a bed in a Moscow hotel room that President Barack Obama had previously slept in during a visit to Russia.

Trump is wrong about the dossier in two different ways. First, we know who paid for it and it wasn’t the FBI: private American political donors( article link https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/how-the-explosive-russian-dossier-was-compiled-christopher-steele ) first supporters of Trump’s Republican primary opponents and later Democrats trying to torpedo his general election bid. Second, while he’s right that the dossier is not fully confirmed — particularly some of the most salacious details such as the urine incident — but by no stretch of the imagination is it “fake.” In fact, a number of its claims have been found to be true.

“Well before any public knowledge of these events, the [Steele dossier] identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to reportedly discuss the receipt of stolen documents,” John Sipher, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, writes in Slate.


Read more: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/19/16503050/trump-tweet-fbi-steele-dossier

Link to tweet