State Department
An Obama political appointee at the State Department brought Mr. Steele together with Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton operative who briefed him on supposed Trump dirt. Mr. Steele delivered the material to the FBI.
Leaks
Washington media wrote a number of articles on Trump-Russia collusion and quoted unidentified Obama officials. The New York Times greeted Mr. Trump on Inauguration Day with a story claiming conspiracy. The next month, it again relied on Obama people to report that there was a huge number of intercepts and phone records between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.
Mr. Comey later told Congress that the story was wrong.
Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s top Russia analyst during the Obama era, said on MSNBC last year that she urged her former colleagues to secure as much intelligence material as they could to protect it from destruction by Trump aides. She left the Pentagon in 2015 and advised the Clinton campaign.
“That’s why you have the leaking, because people were worried,” said Ms. Farkas, who is now a scholar at the Atlantic Council.
Michael Flynn
Conservatives often point to Flynn’s fate as a prime example of the Obama “deep state” bushwhacking a Trump person.
The retired three-star Army intelligence officer held phone discussions with Mr. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, on an upcoming U.N. vote on Israel and Moscow’s response to Obama-imposed punitive sanctions for election meddling.
On Jan. 12, 2017, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on the phone calls, quoting an unidentified Obama official. Other stories followed. The Obama administration was leaking top-secret intercepts.
When interviewed by two FBI agents in his first week as national security adviser, Flynn said those topics were not discussed. The agents told their superiors that they didn’t believe Flynn was deceptive.
Sally Q. Yates, a holdover deputy attorney general from the Obama administration, visited the White House and told officials that Flynn was at risk for Russian blackmail. She believed he violated the 1799 Logan Act, an obscure law preventing private citizens from working with foreigners against government policy.
Mr. Trump fired Ms. Yates when she failed to follow his Muslim immigration ban.
Suddenly, a law that few had heard of became weaponized in the liberal media against Flynn. Conservatives said it was an example of Obama people spinning the media in unison against the new administration.
The Republican report from the House intelligence committee disclosed that Flynn in December 2016 was the subject of the counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Comey had decided to close the investigation in December 2016 but he kept it open because of the Kislyak phone calls.
The House committee interviewed Mr. Comey, Ms. Yates and two other FBI officials. They gave “conflicting testimony” on why agents were dispatched to interview Flynn, the report said.
Flynn resigned that February because of discrepancies in his answers versus the call transcripts. He opted to plead guilty in December to giving false statements to the FBI.
The plea deal with Mr. Mueller did not mention any conspiracies. There has been much press speculation about why Flynn chose to admit guilt, some of it centering on his huge legal costs.
Since then, Flynn has made public statements in support of at least two Republican House candidates and praised Mr. Trump in one of them.