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Fact check: What were the sources of Christopher Steele's information in the dossier?
Executive Summary
The materials provided do not identify the specific sources Christopher Steele used for the dossier; instead they primarily cover procedural and archival matters. Two items summarize The Marshall Project’s records and do not name sources, while two duplicates report a federal court protecting Steele’s First Amendment right to distribute the dossier, again without detailing the dossier’s informants [1] [2].
1. What the supplied records actually claim — a clear gap in sourcing
The set of documents and analyses supplied makes no affirmative claim about who provided information to Christopher Steele for the dossier; their content centers on record-keeping and legal protections rather than investigative provenance. The Marshall Project overview frames Steele within a broader record set about criminal justice and 2016 election reporting but omits source details, meaning the supplied archive record cannot answer the provenance question [1]. This absence is salient because it leaves the core user question — named or described informants — unanswered by the provided materials.
2. What the legal reporting says — protection, not provenance
Two of the items describe a court ruling that protects Steele’s right to distribute the dossier under the First Amendment, but they focus on constitutional and procedural implications and do not recount the identities or descriptions of Steele’s human sources. These analyses repeatedly underscore that the court action was about distribution rights and not about validating or revealing source networks, so the supplied legal reporting cannot be used to infer who fed information to Steele [2].
3. How the dates and duplicates shape the picture
The record-summary entries are dated November 7, 2025, while the legal-rights analyses are dated September 10, 2025; both dates appear in the supplied analyses and indicate recent administrative and judicial attention to Steele’s dossier distribution and archival status [1] [2]. The presence of duplicate analyses of the same court ruling suggests editorial or database redundancy rather than new factual revelations about Steele’s sources, reinforcing that these particular items were not intended as investigative source-disclosure documents.
4. What the supplied materials do not tell you — explicit omissions
The source analyses explicitly fail to identify named witnesses, intermediaries, intelligence channels, or documentary evidence that would establish where Steele’s claims originated. Because each provided summary either catalogues records or treats constitutional protection, the crucial investigative details — whether sources were Russian officials, Western-based interlocutors, or offshore intermediaries — are simply absent from the supplied dataset [1] [2]. That omission is a factual finding about the materials reviewed.
5. Possible agendas and interpretive caution in the supplied items
The supplied items serve different institutional functions—archival cataloging and legal advocacy—each with potential institutional agendas: archives prioritize preservation and indexing, while court reports emphasize constitutional principles. Those functions shape what is reported and what is omitted; the archival note is unlikely to dig into investigative sourcing, and the court-focused writeups are unlikely to explore provenance, which explains the consistent absence of source detail across the dataset [1] [2].
6. What would be required to answer the user’s question fully
A definitive, evidence-based list of Steele’s sources would require materials not included in the supplied analyses: contemporaneous investigative reports, judicial filings presenting evidentiary material, or Steele’s own disclosures. The data at hand do not contain such evidentiary documents, so they cannot support attribution of claims to particular informants. This is an explicit limitation of the current corpus rather than a statement about the underlying truth of the dossier’s claims [1] [2].
7. How to proceed given the documented limitations
Given the confirmed absence of source-identifying material in the supplied records, the only analytic option is to treat the question as unresolved by this dataset. The materials do, however, establish two firm facts: the dossier is present in contemporary archival records, and a federal court has ruled on Steele’s distribution rights—both matters of public record as of the cited dates. Any additional factual claim about specific sources would require consulting other, more investigatory or evidentiary documents beyond those provided [1] [2].
8. Bottom line — what we can assert and what remains unknown
From the provided materials we can assert with confidence that the supplied documents do not disclose Christopher Steele’s information sources, and that recent coverage in late 2025 treats the dossier primarily as an archival and First Amendment subject rather than an evidentiary dossier whose sources are being revealed. The question of who specifically informed Steele therefore remains unanswered by this collection, and resolving it will require additional investigative or legal-source documentation not included in the set you supplied [1] [2].