2016 ELECTION/INTELLIGENCE/JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Congress is probing the Obama administration’s decision to use research by an ex-British spy to justify, in part, surveillance of an associate of Donald Trump, as Republican scrutiny rises of law-enforcement actions during 2016 presidential campaign.
In the final days of the campaign, the Justice Department used information from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official, as part of its request for a secret court order to monitor Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and his ties to Russia, say people familiar with the matter.
At the time, Mr. Steele was working for a research firm that was being paid by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He produced a 35-page dossier of salacious and unverified allegations involving Mr. Trump that the president has dismissed as false.
Republican lawmakers want to know how Mr. Steele’s information came to be used in a secretive and sensitive surveillance probe. They are also trying to determine when, and if, the FBI learned that the Democratic Party was financing Mr. Steele’s work through the opposition research firm Fusion GPS—which could raise concerns about whether the surveillance was politically motivated. No evidence has emerged that the surveillance was improper.”
-Byron Tau and Del Quentin Wilber, “Republicans Probe How Ex-British Spy’s Research Sparked Trump Surveillance,” The Wall Street Journal online, Jan. 19, 2018 09:04am