F.B.I. Pick Pushed False and Misleading Claims About Trump Investigations

But the dossier was not the root or the start of the investigation. According to the inspector general and special counsel reports, the dossier reached officials working on the Russia inquiry on Sept. 19, 2016 — six weeks after they had already opened the case based on the Australian tip.

In response, Mr. Patel’s spokeswoman said that the tip from Australia “was not official intelligence” and insisted that the Steele dossier was “the central piece” of the inquiry.

The Carter Page wiretap applications

Steele would leak the information, then the F.B.I. would use the media reports planted by their own source to bolster its investigations. One particular story went to Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News, which discussed how Trump campaign aide Carter Page traveled to Moscow … in order to justify part of their FISA warrant application on Carter Page. … The F.B.I. knew about Steele’s bias and that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid for the dossier at the time they submitted their FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page, but they never told the FISA judge either of these facts, as was required by law.
— “Government Gangsters”

To put the Carter Page FISA warrant into perspective, this wasn’t just routine police work. By getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page, the F.B.I. effectively had the ability to spy on most, if not all, of the Trump campaign communications, including messages from Donald Trump himself. That’s because these warrants don’t just let the F.B.I. observe the subject of the warrant but also people one or even two degrees removed from the subject. That means the entire Trump campaign could have been in the F.B.I. dragnet. … As I mentioned earlier, the F.B.I. didn’t need to spy on Donald Trump personally because a single surveillance warrant on one person in the campaign would give them the ability to do all the spying they could need on effectively any person in the campaign, including the candidate himself.
— “Government Gangsters”

As a Republican staff member on the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Patel sought to discredit the Russia investigation by zeroing in on the F.B.I.’s applications to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser with ties to Russia.

The applications, filed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, cited certain claims from the Steele dossier — the only investigative use the F.B.I. made of that flawed document. The scrutiny of Mr. Page was a dead end, and the inquiry’s final report did not cite the dossier for any factual findings. But the wiretapping took on larger political significance.

In what became known as the Nunes memo, a reference to Mr. Patel’s boss at the time, Representative Devin Nunes, Mr. Patel compiled a list of purported flaws in the wiretap applications, which remained classified at the time. Democrats, in their own memo, countered that many claims in the Nunes memo were false.