Steele a CHS bound by certain obligations. Steele, however, considered himself a businessperson whose firm (not Steele) had a contractual CHS agreement with the FBI and whose election related work was not undertaken pursuant to that agreement, but instead was conducted solely on behalf of his firm's client (Fusion GPS), not the FBI. This disagreement led to divergent expectations about Steele's conduct, affected the FBI's control over Steele during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and ultimately resulted in the FBI formally closing Steele as a CHS (although, as we discuss later in this chapter, we found the FBI continued its relationship with Steele through Ohr). A. The FBI's Receipt, Use, and Assessment of Steele's Reporting As described in Chapter Four, the Crossfire Hurricane team first learned of Steele's reports when they received six of them from Handling Agent 1 in September 2016. 502 The reporting was not the result of any proactive FBI investigative action, or any FBI tasking or direction to Steele. Rather, Steele's election reporting was developed at the request of his consulting firm's client, Fusion GPS, and was provided to the FBI with his client's consent. We found that the FBI was aware of the potential for political bias in the Steele election reporting from the outset of obtaining it. Handling Agent 1 told us that when Steele provided him with Report 80 in July 2016 and described his engagement with Fusion GPS, it was obvious to Handling Agent 1 that the request for the research was politically motivated. 503 The Supervisory Intel Analyst explained that he also was aware of the potential for political influence on the Steele election reporting when it became available to the Crossfire Hurricane team in September 2016. We determined that the FBI's decisions to use Steele's information in Crossfire Hurricane and to task him in October 2016 were based on multiple factors unrelated to political considerations, includin : Steele's rior work as an ~ence professional for a -; (2) his expertise on Russia; (3) his past record as an FBI CHS, which included furnishing information concerning the activities of Russian oligarchs and investigative leads involving corruption in FIFA; ( 4) the assessment of Handling Agent 1 that Steele was reliable and had provided information to the FBI in the past 502 Steele first gave Handling Agent 1 two of these six reports in July 2016